Fr Michael Tate and Mayor Troy Pickard with the Sacred Heart College Contemporary Band.
Camera IconFr Michael Tate and Mayor Troy Pickard with the Sacred Heart College Contemporary Band. Credit: Supplied/Supplied

Prayer extols ‘poetry’ of life

Justin Bianchini, Joondalup TimesWanneroo Times

Tasmanian law professor and Catholic parish pastor Michael Tate, a justice minister in the Hawke-Keating governments and a former ambassador to the Netherlands and Holy See, drew on a W.H. Auden poem that had ‘hit him like a bombshell’ and led him to abandon life as a diplomat to study for the priesthood.

Auden had been asked to write an elegy for a brilliant poet dead at 35 after ‘too much booze, too much debauchery’.

‘Friends of the young poet thought Auden would write a poem which extolled the virtue for a poet of living on the edge of every experience however self-indulgent, however ultimately destructive’ce,’ Fr Tate said.

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