Dungfork and Sloppail

I continue to munch on Hill’s Collected Critical Writings. Much that is new on T.S. Eliot. Healthily ironic that a writer so often decried as authoritarian (Hill I mean) should spend so much time patiently and carefully anatomizing Eliot’s tragic decline, and demonstrating Eliot’s trading of a once startling spirit of inquiry for the empty postures of authoritarian fiat in his post-Nobel papal senescence.

More cheeringly, this encomium from Hopkins, who ‘repeatedly stressed the value of humble unlettered faithfulness’:

To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hands, a woman with a sloppail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live.

{Quotation ends}

Take up your life and walk.