T. S. Eliot in Concord

Concord Academy, Concord, Massachusetts, a secondary school for the daughters of the local squires. It had been hoped that the exercises could be held outdoors, and one looked forward to hearing Eliot speak under the ancient elms of the campus, surrounded by the lilacs and hyacinths he praises in his poems strong, fertile-looking flowers which grew where once the soldiers of his king had felt the musket shot of the "embattled farmers'* and spilled their blood on the grassBut it had rained hard all day. Thoreau's Concord River flowed with its dark, over-full vigor; Hawthorne's Old Manse glowered morosely from among its tall, rain-swept elms and firs; the Emerson House looked with a dour, watery asceticism upon the Cadillacs and the beachwagons. Eliot delivered his address in the gymnasium. As he walked onto the stage with the school officials, some local dignitaries and the governor of the Commonwealth, one was struck by the forward stoop of his shoulders and the tired forward thrust of his head. One thought of "Ash Wednesday": "Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?" As he sat on his folding chair, flanked on one side by the handsome, forty-fivish headmistress and on the other by a nameless man (was it Stetson?) with a characterless mouth, pink cheeks and close-set eyes, he appeared somewhat glum. But he occasionally surveyed the audience with a sort of benevolent smile, or looked first down at the freshly combed and