Ash-Wednesday by T S Eliot

Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again The infirm glory of the positive hour Because I do not think Because I know I shall not know The one veritable transitory power Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face And renounce the voice Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us And pray that I may forget These matters that with myself I too much discuss Too much explain Because I do not hope to turn again Let these words answer For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull. And God said Shall these bones live? shall these Bones live? And that which had been contained In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping: Because of the goodness of this Lady And because of her loveliness, and because She honours the Virgin in meditation, We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

It is this which recovers My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown. Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness. There is no life in them. As I am forgotten And would be forgotten, so I would forget Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied End of the endless Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible Speech without word and Word of no speech Grace to the Mother

For the Garden Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other, Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand, Forgetting themselves and each other, united In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair I turned and saw below The same shape twisted on the banister Under the vapour in the fetid air Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair I left them twisting, turning below; There were no more faces and the stair was dark, Damp, jagged, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond repair, Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark.

At the first turning of the third stair Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute. Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair; Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over

the third stair, Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet Who walked between The various ranks of varied green Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour, Talking of trivial things In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour Who moved among the others as they walked, Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour, Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded. The new years walk, restoring Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue Between the yews, behind the garden god, Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down Redeem the time, redeem the dream The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence Not on the sea or on the islands, not On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land, For those who walk in darkness Both in the day time and in the night time

The right time and the right place are not here No place of grace for those who avoid the face No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender Yew trees pray for those who offend her And are terrified and cannot surrender And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks In the last desert before the last blue rocks The desert in the garden the garden in the desert Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again Although I do not hope Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying (Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things From the wide window towards the granite shore The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices And the weak spirit quickens to rebel For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell Quickens to recover The cry of quail and the whirling plover And the blind eye creates The empty forms between the ivory gates And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross Between blue rocks But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden, Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still Even among these rocks, Our peace in His will And even among these rocks Sister, mother And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea, Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee. Comment is free

How to believe

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TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday – a call to

spiritual awareness that falls short

As with Dante, this is a poem in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of

heaven

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o Roz Kaveney o o theguardian.com, Tuesday 6 May 2014 15.05 BST o Jump to comments (174)

TS Eliot pictured in 1919. 'There is something deeply sad, but also dishonest, in this

replacement of what he perhaps really desired with an etiolated and inauthentic religious

vision.' Photograph: EO Hoppe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Among the first fruits of TS Eliot's conversion were the first three parts of the poem

that he ended up calling Ash Wednesday and that, accordingly, we think of, not wholly inaccurately, as an essentially liturgical piece. Ash Wednesday is – after all – a

set of rituals and prayers that Anglicanism ended up transferring across from Catholicism essentially unaltered. For a high Anglican like Eliot it was perhaps especially important that Protestants such as Thomas Cranmer tried to remove them

and failed. The liturgy is a reminder of mortality and a call to repentance both individual and collective; the poem does these things, but also creates, in its later

sections, an idealised medieval landscape, a jewelled pictorial Book of Hours to contemplate as well as pray over.

Yet that is not all that is going on here. When the poem was first published as a whole in 1930, it was dedicated to Vivienne, from whom he was increasingly estranged but

not yet formally separated. Eliot had chosen as his spiritual adviser a clergyman who, after hearing his confession, agreed that he should probably end the marriage – it's

worth remembering that for Eliot, who never tried to divorce Vivienne, this meant, because he took these issues seriously, a choice of celibacy. This is perhaps not entirely surprising given how he had written of the sexual life in The Waste Land and

in Sweeney Agonistes; his misogyny meant that he blamed and went on blaming Vivienne. (When he appeared as the murderer Crippen for fancy dress, she went as his

cross-dressed mistress and accomplice, not his wife and victim.)

For a religious poem, Ash Wednesday has a distinctly secular aspect some of the time. Even more than The Waste Land, it is heavily intertextual; you can read its allusions

as metonymous, that is to say as bringing into his text the whole of the texts that they echo. The first section, for example, originally had the title of a love poem by the Florentine Cavalcanti that its first line echoes: "Perch'i' no spero di tornar giammai"

– "Because I do not hope to turn again".

We are so used to reading what Eliot wrote, with its evocation of spiritual dryness, its sense of himself as "an aged eagle" with stubs instead of wings – he was 40 – learning

"to sit still" and find spiritual solace in withdrawal and renunciation, that it comes as a shock to realise that in the poem he chose to echo, the dying Cavalcanti is still praising his mistress, sending his poem to be her comforter. There is something quite

creepy in his dedicating the whole poem to Vivienne when the first section so totally refuses to be the sort of love poem it echoes.

The second section is just as sinister, but also Eliot at his most beautiful and lyrical.

The echoes here are of courtly love again, but also of Dante – the leopards that have eaten the poet's heart and brains leaving his bones dry are associated with sins like lust and idleness and gluttony – and the brothers Grimm. Unpack that reference and

we find long-concealed murder and betrayal revealed and punished against all odds – what was there in Eliot's marriage to Vivienne that makes him feel such a sinner?

That was so dreadful that his confessor thought he should end it? That makes the bones glad to be done with life – "we are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other"?

Yet tied to these moments of nightmare – and the ones in the next section where Eliot is pursued on a staircase by sinister ghosts and urban squalor – is the evocation of a

Lady, who is the Virgin, and all of the Beloveds of courtly love, and most especially Dante's Beatrice, and is also associated with gardens and fertility and a sort of organic

community. She is also, presumably, Emily Hale, whom Eliot's poetry associates with gardens from the beginning; Eliot demonises one of his muses and places another on a goddess-like pedestal, and in both cases you end up feeling that the real woman gets

progressively erased from his work.

It's interesting that there is so much talk of fertility here and it is always gardens and never children. By separating from Vivienne, and adopting celibacy, Eliot was

accepting childlessness. In a more or less contemporaneous poem called Marina, he talks of yearning for a daughter – echoing Shakespeare's Pericles and his reunion with his child against the odds, but also, in the epigraph, Seneca's Hercules, waking from a

madness in which he has killed wife and child. There is something deeply sad, but also dishonest, in this replacement of what he perhaps really desired with an etiolated

and inauthentic religious vision; Eliot at his best speaks more honestly than that, even when he is being cryptic.

The later sections of the poem are a call to spiritual awareness, and acceptance of

divine forgiveness. There's something worrying, if logical, about Eliot's vision of himself as a preacher calling the world to order – it was after all, the original family business, running revivals was why his ancestors moved to the Midwest. The problem

is that the organic society he shows us is so totally a decoration, people walking and talking in a landscape, and a piper playing plaintive tunes; in the later sections of Ash Wednesday, the quotations of liturgy are progressively stronger than the bits that are

Eliot.

This is a poem – the same can be said of Dante – in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of heaven, in which the original evocation of the heavenly

(the lyric "Lady of silences" in the second section) is much more effective than the later parts; Eliot is trying urgently to convince us, and sacrificing much to that

attempt, and yet he falls short of what he is trying to do.

Today is Ash Wednesday and although I did not want to provide a reading of a long poem for some time, I thought not posting on T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (1930) would be a lost opportunity. Below is a

Dantean reading of Eliot’s poem. The wonder of Eliot’s poetry (like most great poetry) is that it can lead you anywhere. So read this post and take from it what you

will but take a break before reading the poem. Grab a coffee, watch Downton Abbey,

but try to read the poem without me in your head. I’d love to hear any interpretations. Enjoy.

For Eliot, Dante was more than a poetic master who had achieved the heights of

poetry. As Eliot struggled through life literally searching for perfection, he rediscovered Dante, finding in his poetry not merely a poetics but also a way of life.

Now, I don’t solely mean in regards to religion, in fact I am hardly concerned with religion at all. Eliot himself had written in that ‘It is wrong to think that there are parts of the Divine Comedy which are of interest only to Catholics’ and in his address

‘What Dante Means to Me’ (1950)—after his religious conversion—he stated, ‘to call [Dante] a “religious poet” would be to abate his universality.’ Eliot looked to Dante

because Dante had succeeded in attaining the closest thing a poet could to poetical perfection, and he had done it regardless of the social and personal complexities of life. Eliot, initially captivated by Dante’s poetics, would come to grow engrossed by

the man as their respective lives began to mirror one another to the extent that the modern and the medieval can.

Although Eliot’s early poetry uses many religious themes and motifs, it is not until

1925 that his poetry begins to convey any sort of leaning toward a single dogma. In fact, Eliot had regarded Buddhism as perhaps the most compelling form of

spiritualism at the time of The Waste Land. Given these early, protean views, readers rising out of The Waste Land and moving directly into Ash Wednesday will experience one of poetry’s most difficult transitions in regards to philosophical

positioning; however ambivalence may be what Eliot is attempting to convey, as it is his belief that the highest stage possible for the civilized man ‘is to unite the profoundest skepticism with the deepest faith.’

In 1925—two years prior to his conversion and the subsequent writing of what is now part II of Ash Wednesday—Eliot had begun to reassess his studies of Dante. Sometime between 1926 and 1929

(the year Eliot published his most substantial work on Dante), he would come to parallel his beliefs most fundamentally with those of Dante’s. It is likely that—on

some level—Dante influenced Eliot’s religious conversion. Despite its religious leanings, Ash Wednesday—as Eliot says of Dante’s Paradiso—is not didactic. The religious, Dantean themes in Ash Wednesday have been thoroughly excavated by

scholars, as the allusions are relatively more palpable than they are in his other poetry. However, what is most important is that in Ash Wednesday Eliot searches for (and

seems to gain) a particular assurance that his poetry can bridge the gap between the ‘low-dream’ of the modern world and the ‘high-dream’ of Dante’s vision. Ash

Wednesday marks Eliot’s personal-poetic search for the ability to materialize the Word Incarnate with the written word.

Eliot’s view that ‘all faith should be seasoned with a skillful sauce of skepticism’ is

what makes the first line of Ash Wednesday and the position of the speaker’s philosophy throughout so difficult to fully ascertain. Eliot institutes several

disjunctive techniques as a type of objective correlative that sustains the vacillating nature of the speaker’s mind. These are the overlay of space and place, a lack of linearity, and ambiguous lexicon or multiple entendre. The ‘turn’ in the opening line

of Ash Wednesday denotes the linchpin around which the whole poem rotates: ambiguity. The turn will come to signify the turning toward God, the look to a secular

past, glimpses toward the future and many other possibilities. Most importantly, the turn is the repetitious but non-retrogressive movement from the active will to the contemplative mind.

Part I portrays the struggle between the individual’s will and intellect, collating the two pressing skepticisms within its ambiguity. That Eliot begins Ash Wednesday with an almost direct translation of Calvacanti followed by an almost direct quote from

Shakespeare, marks Eliot’s first skepticism. The ‘gift’ Eliot desires to be gifted with is poetry that can transcend to heaven. Through the rewriting of text, Eliot tries to attain

‘a conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written.’ The word of the poet and the transcendent Word are wholly deliberated upon in both the fourth poem, in which the pure poetic imagination is considered, and the

fifth poem, where the poet’s adequacy in the expression of reality is questioned. This questioning of his poetic transcendence is most explicitly present in his humility at the gate of Purgatory in the third poem: ‘Lord, I am not worthy / Lord, I am not worthy

/ but speak the word only.’

The passage through the gate of Purgatory will mark the full religious conversion and it is figured within a poem that is an exodus more fully realized than The Waste Land;

the exodus here is one of necessary, willful expiation, as for Eliot the ascetic way of penance is the means to the way of grace. The will (which wavered in the opening

poem) is strengthened in the final two lines, representing not the altered word of some poet but rather the pure speech of transcendence through the voice of the Churches invocation of Mary: ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.’ The death

is the spiritual death leading to baptismal rebirth that Eliot had feared (‘Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?’) out the outset.

The second poem of Ash Wednesday was originally titled ‘Salutation’, referring to the

first time Beatrice greets Dante in La Vita Nuova III: ‘with a salutation of such virtue that I thought then to see the world of blessedness.’ In La Vita Nuova, Dante struggles twice with the desire of the physical; first with Beatrice and later with a mysterious

lady to whom he is attracted. It is possible that Eliot’s renunciation of the ‘blessèd face’ is in fact the physical face, which Dante renounced in order to attain salvation,

and not a turning from the spiritual face.

The ‘three white leopards,’ might be read as a positive inverse of the leopard of lust of Dante’s Inferno, representing a

violent though willful expiation of lust. After the leopards have ‘fed to satiety on my heart my liver and that which had been contained / In the hollow round of my skull,’

the left over bones ‘shine with brightness’ because of the virtuousness of the Lady. The now pure essence of the speaker—the ‘I who am’—is able to ‘Proffer [his] deeds to oblivion’ and his ‘love / To the posterity of the desert,’ which is at once in ‘The

desert in the garden [and] the garden in the desert’ brought about by Mary, ‘The single Rose’ who is now ‘the Garden / Where all loves end.’

In Part III, the speaker has awoken from the dream of contemplation at the violet hour

and come face-to-face with three stairs of the active will. The progression of the winding staircase holds in the balance the presence of a metaphysical poetry within the modern world. ‘The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green’ who enchants

‘the maytime with an antique flute’ is not only a look back to secular desires— figured here in pagan imagery—which once enchanted the heart, but, if it is

succumbed to would assert that modern poetry is only capable of the ‘low-dream.’ For this reason the look back to the pagan imagery on the third stair can

only be glimpsed through a ‘slotted window

bellied like a fig’s fruit’ (109); the vision is impeded upon by the narrowed window of

secularism because both the will and the intellect are torn between the secular wor(l)d and the Wor(l)d of God. As Eliot climbs the third stair, having gathered the ‘strength

beyond hope and despair,’ he is able to humbly admit that he can ‘speak the word only’. After this admission, he is able to re-experience for himself the vision of God’s

Word that he had only evinced through Ezekiel beneath the juniper tree, and he recapitulates the experience through the great mediator of the Word (Dante) who Eliot

considered to have the gift of incarnation.

While walking ‘between the violet and the violet’ in a garden where the ‘fiddles and the flutes’ of the pagan scene have been ‘bear[ed] away’, Eliot is able to initiate his transcendence. His memories of the previous years are restored through a ‘bright of

cloud tears’ and he subsequently will be able to write ‘With a new verse the ancient rhyme’ in order to ‘Redeem / The unread vision in the higher dream.’ Then the Lady,

Word of no speech, ‘signed but spoke no word.’ Logos is witnessed but it is still mediated through an Other.

However, he does not experience the transcendental movement into the still point of

Incarnation. He is still aware of the ‘the empty forms’ of the secular world and also that through the process of memory he may renew the ‘salt savour of the sandy earth.’ In this moment, when face-to-face with a carnal past, ‘the weak spirit quickens to

rebel.’ It is not until the crucial moment when he ‘[spits] from the mouth the withered apple-seed’ thereby purging himself of humanity’s first failure that he can attempt to

reach Logos on a personal and intellectual level.

In this lesson, you will learn what Eliot's poem 'Ash Wednesday' is about and what it means within the context of the speaker's struggles as he moves toward God and his own redemption.

We also recommend watching Introduction to T.S. Eliot: Author Background, Works,

and Style and Shakespeare's Venus And Adonis: Summary, Analysis & Quiz

Summary

'Ash Wednesday' is often referred to as Eliot's conversion poem because it is

one of the first long poems he wrote after converting to Anglicanism, the

officially established Christian Church of England. The title refers to 'Ash Wednesday,' the first of the forty days

of Lent, which is a time for self reflection, sacrifice, and repentance.

The poem is divided into six sections,

and it deals with the speaker's aspiration to move from a sense of spiritual despair to spiritual salvation.

Six Sections

In Section 1, the speaker is set to reject all worldly things. In the first two

stanzas, he rejects the hope of any fulfillment in worldly diversions, any

potential for joy in existence, and acknowledges that the 'one veritable transitory power' is insubstantial, prone to fading away into thin air.

In stanzas three and four, the speaker rejoices in his own helplessness to change the human condition, rejects the beauty of the world and its temptations, and calls upon

humanity to 'pray to God to have mercy upon us.' In the final stanza of Section 1, the speaker rejects all worldly dreams and aspirations, 'Because these wings are no longer

wings to fly/ But merely vans to beat the air.'

In Section 2, the stanzas appeal to the Lady, the Mary figure, and introduce three white leopards that have eaten the speaker's flesh and released his bones to sing, crediting the Lady's goodness that his bones now 'shine with brightness.' The section

ends with God telling the speaker to prophecy to the empty wind.

In Section 3, the speaker climbs the stairs and looks back on his past temptations of self-deceit, despair, and lust. 'At the first turning of the second stair,' he leaves the

devil and the past 'twisting, turning below,' and enters darkness. Then he makes a direct appeal to God to 'Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still.' The section ends with a couplet taken directly from 'Ave Maria' in the Anglo-Catholic

version of the Rosary; 'Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death/ Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.'

In Section 4, the speaker pays homage to a vision of the Lady, 'in white and blue, in

Mary's colour' that stresses both her ignorance and her knowledge, as well as her ability to make things firm. She walks in a realm 'between sleep and waking' as a

vision of light, veiled and silent among the yews, where birds reveal the vision of transcendence, of 'the higher dream.'

TS Eliot

In Section 5, the speaker questions if the Lady will pray for 'those who walk in darkness' in the world with all its terror and denial.

In Section 6, the speaker moves from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday, the day

commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus, and the final day of Lent. The first stanza repeats the opening stanza of the poem, changing the word 'Because' to 'Although, '

while the fourth stanza cautions us, once again, not to be distracted by worldly things.

Then the speaker reveals the Lady, the Mary figure, as a reincarnation of the Holy

Spirit and directs to her his earlier plea to God to 'Teach us to care and not to care/

Teach us to sit still.'

The poem ends with a prayer from the Psalms: 'And let my cry come into thee' (Psalm 102:1)

Analysis

In Section 1, although the speaker is set to reject all worldly things, it is an act of despair. He 'rejoices' only because he rejects the beauty in a 'blessèd face' and 'voice,'

in the sensuality of the world. He believes that the world as he knows it is all that exists. But, this belief and the despair it brings is what prepares him for salvation,

because only from his weakness, can his 'wings (that) are no longer wings to fly' be made whole; and only from his spiritual death will come something 'Upon which to rejoice.'

In Section 2, as the leopards of death eat away at his organs of his desire, and his pure white bones sing their praises of the Lady, the speaker gives his love to the desert of loss so he can forget the world and all its darkness and despair. Then God tells him to

prophecy to the empty wind of his spiritual barrenness, evoking the knowledge that, ironically, his spiritual inheritance is in this desert realm of death and re-birth.