[1] Elliott entered Memorial University of Newfoundland at the age of 25, where he won numerous scholarships and awards, graduating with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature.
Following studies in psychology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, he worked for a time as a clinical psychologist in St. John's, and then as an editor with the Queen's Printer in Ottawa before returning to Memorial as a Ph.D. student in the early 1970s.
Soon after his appointment to the English faculty at Grenfell College, however, inspired by an ambience that encouraged creative writing, he started to publish new poetry in literary magazines and anthologies, and began to receive invitations to read his work publicly.
An apparently simple narrative is complicated by language, which underscores the naked humanity of all the characters, and by point of view, which, in locating the monologue on the day between Christ's death and his resurrection, shows it to be time-limited.
The poem ends in abandonment and despair as Thomas resolves to leave "this gray Jerusalem / where he lies sleeping in the hollowed stone, / Never to come into his kingdom now."