Tag Archives: Ezekiel

Eliot’s Search for Hope in Dry Bones

By Robin Bates | Published: March 25, 2023

T.S. Eliot conveys his spiritual desolation in “Waste Land” with references to Ezekiel’s dry bones. But, in the end, there’s a faint sign of hope.

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I Will Take A Sprig from a Lofty Cedar

By Robin Bates | Published: June 12, 2021

Ezekiel’s poem about cedar trees brings to mind a Robert Haas poem about apple trees. Both tree poems promise a renewal of faith.

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Valley of Dry Bounds, a Waste Land

By Robin Bates | Published: March 28, 2020

Spiritual Sunday As we are in the Lenten season, the liturgy has of reading one of the strangest passages in the Bible, that being Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. I repost today an essay from April 6, 2016 on  T. S. Eliot’s allusion to the imagery. Given how desolate many of us are feeling these […]

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Though Thou Art in Thy Blood, Live

By Robin Bates | Published: May 31, 2015

Spiritual Sunday A couple of weeks ago my library reading group discussed Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, the third novel in what one member described as a triptych. I love Robinson’s depiction of the Congregationalist minister John Ames in Gilead, and Lila gives us the backstory of the woman that Ames marries as an old man. (Home, […]

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Hope Out of a Dry Bones Wasteland

By Robin Bates | Published: April 6, 2014

In “The Waste Land,” Eliot alludes to Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones multiple times.

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