“Ash Wednesday,” by T.S. Eliot

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

When Elizabeth Esther requested this one, she commented that it was a poem that had changed her life. She backs this up, and lets us in, with a meditation on the poem over at her blog today.  A poem that keeps changing her life, it looks like.  Or a poem that accompanies her faithfully as her life changes. Go read.

“Ash Wednesday” is in T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (Harcourt  Brace Jovanovich). It’s a long one, and rich, so here’s an online copy of the poem you can follow when you hit play again. And if you’d like to hear Eliot read it himself, watch this.