Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” — Shall These Bones Live?
Part 2 of a 6-part series. All Bible verses quoted from the KJV.
If section I of T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday establishes the poem’s conversion premise, section II reveals the metaphoric stakes: spiritual replenishment in the midst of spiritual aridity. This includes an extensive delve into the well of Biblical allusion, primarily in Eliot’s paraphrase — and recasting — of Ezekiel 37:1–14’s narrative of the valley of dry bones. The reference is scarcely subtle:
And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live?
3 And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them.
8 And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.
9 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other
11 Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.
This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance
14 And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.
It’s the overtness of these allusions that raises the question of their significance — and their transformation in meaning from the Old Testament promise of restoration for Israel. Commentators tend to associate these bones with barrenness — symbolic perhaps of a celibate marriage, or spiritual emptiness — or, more ironically, fulfillment. This last sense maybe draws us closest to Ezekiel’s focus: the promised land here is not a literal, but spiritual, grounds to be restored. But there is more here still.
There is, for one, the matter of the Lady whose goodness these bones sing. “Lady” readily calls to mind the Virgin Mary, and she is certainly relevant here. But the Lady honors her; she is not her. She is the object of the poet’s direct address — “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree” — and simultaneously remote, her movements related from a sense of distance. While this address evokes a thought of courtly love, there is no romance here; the Lady, contemplative in her white gown, is more like a personification of purity.
The Rose, however, has been a Marian symbol since the Middle Ages, and the usage here scans as such:
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.
(This four-liner — “Terminate torment / Of love unsatisfied / The greater torment / Of love satisfied” — may seem familiar. It’s difficult not to counter with the observation made a decade later in “Little Gidding”: “Who then devised the torment? Love.”)
Coincidentally, the rose — though there laden with additional symbolic meanings — recurs in “Gidding,” where “the moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree / Are of equal duration.” We’ll see that yew later; here, however, the rose’s companion tree is the juniper, a choice unusually heavy with import.
Most immediately, it suggests another Biblical reference, this one to 1 Kings 19:4–5, in which the prophet Elijah is overcome with exhaustion and despair following his defeat of the false prophets associated with another “Lady” — Jezebel:
4 But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.
5 And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.
Scholars indicate this translation from the Hebrew really refers to another plant, but for these purposes, the existing English translation is the thing here, and it’s reasonable to see a connection between Ash Wednesday’s themes and these matters of spiritual battle, Elijah’s desperate plea for death, and his actual salvation.
But likely as a Biblical source may be, one can’t resist also noting the intriguing, darker possibilities offered by the Brothers Grimm and their folkloric sources in “The Juniper Tree,” one of the more grotesque and, not unsurprisingly, less popularized tales from their canon.
While standing beneath the eponymous juniper tree, a “beautiful and pious” woman wishes for a child “as red as blood and as white as snow.” Her request is granted, and the tree blossoms in accordance with her pregnancy. And as is usual in these things, she dies soon after delivering the longed-for son, victim of the unusual accident of a surfeit of happiness. She is buried beneath the tree and, after a series of horrifying events, so too someday will be this son’s bones. Through an intermediary, these bones sing their woe. And by story’s end, after evil has been cleansed and loss made whole, these bones will live.
Section II is arguably the most visceral of Ash Wednesday, with language becoming more abstract and intellectual moving forward. But the brutality of Eliot’s imagery here is necessary to make plain the consequences. Conversion is no mere turn of mind, but an acceptance of death’s conquest. Purification and restoration can only be achieved when the rot has been exposed.
