6/12/2023 0 Comments A handful of dust book![]() This ‘handful of dust’ which the mysterious and elusive speaker of Eliot’s lines threatens to brandish aloft is often interpreted, then, as a reference to human mortality: we are all ultimately destined to return to nothing more than ‘a handful of dust’. ![]() At Anglican church burials, the words ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ mark the return of the human body to that state from which, the Bible tells us, it originally came: Genesis 3:19 has God telling Adam, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ This opening section is titled ‘The Burial of the Dead’, a reference to the Burial Service text from the Book of Common Prayer. ![]() ![]() It’s worth remembering that this line appears in the first part of the five-part poem. ![]()
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