Ash-Wednesday

“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” - T. S. Eliot

Possible Sources for Ash-Wednesday

Dante’s Purgatorio and Inferno

Dante’s Vita Nuova

The Bible

Sacrifice of the Mass/ Catholic liturgy

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Cavalcanti’s Love Poetry (“Perch’ io non spero)

St. John of the Cross

Henri de Regnier’s “L’Escalier”

Lancelot Andrewes

Buddhist folk tales

Shakespeare’s sonnets

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Pilgrim’s Progress

Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay

Baudelaire

Grimm’s fairy tales

Richard Lovelace

George Herbert

Neo-Platonism

Lucretius

“The Three Ravens” (popular medieval ballad)

popular song “All aboard for Natchez, Cairo, and St. Louis”

Bernadette’s Lady of the Grotto

“The allusions do not seem to reinforce an otherwise approachable meaning but instead seem essential to the structure, not immediately perceivable, of the poem.”

- James Longenbach

Eliot’s Poetic Theory:“Tradition and the Individual

Talent” “… if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the

best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”

“… the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

“What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

“… the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of ‘personality,’ not being necessarily more interesting, or having ‘more to say,’ but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feeling are at liberty to enter into new combinations.”

“Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”

“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

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?…

“Agents of purgation”?

Or

Symbols of consuming sin?

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 deceitful 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 fig’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.

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.

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.

Other Theories Applied to Ash-Wednesday

New Criticism: Hunter to Leavell (1984-85) Post-Structuralism/ Deconstruction: Ferguson

(1979), Bell (1988) Feminism: Daumer (1998) is ONLY one Psychoanalytic: Daumer, Brown (2003) Reader-Response: Meyer (2002), Brown Biographical: Daumer, Palka (2005), Worthen (2009) Genre Studies: Cotter (2002) Cultural Studies: Meyer