Following his conversion, Eliot retains elderly personae in his poetry, in order to address the new perspectives which his faith presents, and contrast those with the perspectives of the old men he had depicted previously, and with the philosophy of lifelong service in which he had been raised. Both Simeon and the Magus are old men at the end of both their eras and their lives, engendering sympathy for their wish to depart. In ‘Ash-Wednesday’ Eliot expresses bitterness, frustration and resignation as he attributes failures of his own to senescence, and he revisits the image of old age which he has presented in the past in order to leave it behind. He sees himself now as an “agèd eagle”, in a position of seniority from which he can castigate the behaviour of another ageing literary figure in ‘Lines for an Old Man’—although other such literary figures question Eliot’s assumption of senior status at the age of forty-two.