Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” — A Lenten Reading
Part 1 of a 6-part series
It’s perhaps impertinent to impute a biographical reading to any work by T.S. Eliot, whose New Criticism rejected such an understanding of poetry, emphasizing interpretation of the text in and of itself. And yet it’s also at times unavoidable, as in the case of 1930’s Ash Wednesday, a religiously allusive work famously considered Eliot’s conversion poem — the first long-form poem written and published, in separate parts, after he joined the Church of England in 1927.
But the work’s title suggests a more explicit thematic link. While Lent is correctly understood as a period of reflection and repentance, preparatory to the agonies of Holy Week and glory of Easter, scholars once theorized that it originated with a specific church need —preparing new converts for membership in the church. And while these beginnings are disputed today, it’s a connection worth acknowledging for literary purposes.
Like most of Eliot’s canon, Ash Wednesday contains some key allusive material, with fragmentary quotes and paraphrases recast into a new form. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” begins the poem, a loose borrowing from Guido Cavalcanti’s “Perch’i’ no spero di tornar giammai” that shifts the dying rejection of a former lover to a more metaphysical musing — not the reluctant loss of the worldly life, but a cautious inclination towards the eternal.
The first section concludes with a more recognizable and direct lifting: “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death / Pray for us now and at the hour of our death,” the first of these the final line of the Hail Mary as prayed in the Catholic and Anglican churches. Here it signals a final move beyond the self, actively seeking out the divine after those first tentative expressions of the initial stanzas. Indeed, the fourth stanza marks the speaker’s first steps past these singular concerns, praying that God “have mercy upon us.” The global and individual intertwine from here, culminating in an entreaty for a sort of universal introspection: “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.”
This idea is expressed more formally in the traditional Sarum Missal, whose Ash Wednesday collect states
Grant, we beseech thee, O Lord, unto thy faithful people, that they may both enter upon the holy solemnities of the fast with befitting piety, and pass through them with undisturbed devotion.
Not coincidentally, the Anglican liturgy features Joel 2:12–17 as one Ash Wednesday reading — “’Turn ye even to me,’ saith the Lord.” Here is a call for His people’s repentance, issued centuries before the time of Christ. The mercy of God for which the Ash Wednesday speaker hopes, the author of Joel asserts as fact. And while the observance of Ash Wednesday is marked by the placement of ashes on a penitent believer’s forehead, this passage and the day’s other, Matthew 6:16–21, stress not the external display of lamentation, but the personal act of turning:
But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.
Eliot’s body of work in a sense references itself as much as it does outside sources, and it’s worthwhile to locate the echoes — and foreshadows — of other items in Eliot’s canon. The too-inwardness of “These matters that with myself I too much discuss / Too much explain” could evoke the neurosis of a J. Alfred Prufrock, resigned to eternally ponder the ramifications of disturbing the universe. But much of Ash Wednesday also prefigures his great meditation on faith and related concerns, the Four Quartets. “Why should I mourn / The vanished power of the usual reign?” parallels a much later question in “Little Gidding”: “Why should we celebrate / These dead men more than the dying?” The fairly literal meditation here on time:
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
is certainly amplified philosophically throughout the Quartets, including in the first lines of “Burnt Norton”:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
But the ambivalence of this section mirrors not the more lived-in, secure faith of the World War II-era Quartets, but that of the worldly pagan travelers of “Journey of the Magi,” written in the midst of Eliot’s conversion. Where Ash Wednesday darts between prayer and renunciation, the eternal and the constructed idea of the eternal, “Magi” sees its speakers encounter the divine and find themselves the worse for it:
No longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Certainly Eliot’s own turn to Anglo-Catholic faith and practice — while on-trend for many major literary figures of early to mid-twentieth century England — had a similarly estranging effect on some of his fellow Modernists. Virginia Woolf wrote to one friend in early 1928 that Eliot “may be called dead to us all from this day forward” (quoted in Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts, 131).
Returning to this poem’s titular themes, the work stands in six parts — a structure that happily matches the weekly duration of the Lenten season. Over the course of Ash Wednesday, the language of faith, repudiation, and acceptance winds and develops with the speaker’s understanding, and so is each section worth its own analysis — read through not simply its poetic allusions, but a more expansive liturgical and Biblical context.
