Conversion in the Stubborn Season: T. S. Eliot's "A Song for Simeon"

Abstract: T. S. Eliot's conversion was especially a conversion to the truth of dogma. And, for Eliot, no dogma proved more decisive at the time of his conversion than the dogma of the Incarnation. In a particularly heightened way, the Ariel poems express the agony of journeying towards a confession of the Incarnation—a journey that Eliot himself made under the literary and theological tutelage of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes. The speaker of "A Song for Simeon" offers a counterpoint to Eliot's conversion. The speaker is unable to accept the radical truth of the Incarnation. Instead Eliot's Simeon concludes, "I am dying in my own death."