872 The Beatles “Eleanor Rigby” 1966

“‘Eleanor Rigby’ emerges as the Beatle’s most explicitly religious song…What the Beatles offered in place of a religious eschatology was an unprecedented emphasis on the reality of the here and now…Doubly ironic, then, is that the Beatles should be viewed as simultaneously symbolic of the past and as quasi-religious figures themselves” (Kevin McCarron, in Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four, 2006).

The Beatles “Eleanor Rigby”