An Unnoticed Liturgical Parallel in T. S. Eliot's 'A Song for Simeon'

Abstract

‘NOT for me the ultimate vision’,1 Simeon, in Eliot’s poem dedicated to the biblical personage, claims. Critics have, on the whole, heard the utterance as a lament and read this spiritual languor into the poem at large.2 Eliot, like Tennyson in Idylls of the King, takes a pointedly sparse narrative—in which Simeon is described as ‘waiting for the consolation of Israel’ (King James Version, Luke 2:25)—and populates it with psychological or spiritual anxiety. The poem ventriloquizes the resignation of a seer who cannot see clearly, a disappointed visionary. However, the identification of an echo of The Book of Common Prayer’s translation of the ‘Agnus Dei’ adds an antiphonal rejoinder to this monotonous reading. This established reading arises from the poem’s perceived reliance—albeit supplemented with some additional details from the gospel—upon a single liturgical text, the ‘Canticle of Simeon’, included in the ‘Order for Evening Prayer’ in The Book of Common Prayer or the Roman Catholic Compline service in the Liturgy of the Hours.3 For instance, Eliot’s ‘let thy servant depart/having seen thy salvation’ (106) recalls ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: according to thy word / For mine eyes have seen: thy salvation’;4 the poem also repeats the phrase ‘according to thy word’ (105). ‘A Song for Simeon’ asks the reader to hear, in the way the poetic persona’s words echo the canticle, the timeless or for-all-time liturgical enactment of waiting.