Given up hope? Join the club

During the Middle Ages, some of the monastic halls which evolved into Oxbridge colleges allowed their younger inmates to indulge in jocundus honestus after the evening meal. There is nothing monastic about the clubs around St James’s, least of all at their dining tables. But there is still plenty of jocund. Honestus? That is another matter.

The other evening, in a gathering well-equipped with bottles and glasses, someone remarked that we were still in the last lap of Lent and then asked an improbable and unexpected question: ‘So what have you given up, Anderson?’ I was pleased with my reply: ‘Hope.’ That provoked table-wide groans, from those who feared that we might be about to discuss either Brexit or the current state of the Tory party, neither of them jocund topics.

To avoid this peril, we discussed hope and Lent in wholly non–political contexts, leading on to Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’. I found a surprising amount of agreement with the proposition that it is his greatest poem; a work of subtlety, power and majesty, a transcendent fusion of lyricism and intellect. It begins ‘Because I do not hope to turn’, from which one might assume that it would be a threnody, mourning a lost pilgrim doomed to Lent without end. But hope is always there. The dark night of this soul will end in dawn, as expressed in the final line: ‘And let my cry come unto Thee.’

One of the delights of such clubland conversations is their meandering unpredictability. ‘Ash Wednesday’ is much influenced by Dante’s ‘Purgatorio’. Fortified, perhaps, by Eliot’s passage through his own purgatory, we were finally able to brace ourselves and contemplate the Tory party’s… inferno? Let us hope not, though at present there is a distinct hint of lasciare ogni speranza.