READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

St. John's Church, Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire, England On Thursday the 21 st of April Will Johnston, Robert Gribben and I gave a presentation on T.S. Eliot to the Institute for Spiritual Studies at St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. Here is the first part of my contribution to the evening. Thursday the 21 st of April 2016 starts early. Intermittent rain predicted. Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn I wake up from my sleep. Lorikeets chatter in trees of the Heidelberg District. Today I am committed to giving a presentation in town. It’s going to be about Thomas Stearns Eliot. Stearns always seemed like a warning of what was to come and we all know that Thomas is the one who doubts. Eliot, a moderately common name, however we spell it. I knew someone who had a cat called Eliot. Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,           Su...

The Dry Salvages, off Rockport, Massachusetts On Thursday the 21 st of April Will Johnston, Robert Gribben and I gave a presentation on T.S. Eliot to the Institute for Spiritual Studies at St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. Here is the second part of my contribution to that evening, which opened with me reading aloud East Coker II. Poetry is an art of big and small effects. The big effect of The Wasteland is to experience the dissolution of the subjective self into fragments. The big effect of Four Quartets may be our remembrance of how one person uses meaningful places in his own life as ground for meditations on time, memory, humanness and God. Even though these are lasting recollections of the poems, when we wish to draw meaning we go to verses, lines, or even single words, the small effects. It is a few of these small effects in Eliot we turn to now. “That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory.” Well why does he bother? What kind of p...