Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” — The Word Unheard
Part 5 of a 6-part series.
If style is your focus, section V presents the radical departure that section IV promised. The internal rhymes, repetition, puns, and alliteration are uncharacteristic of Ash Wednesday as a whole, and rare in Eliot’s most prominent work. They also engender thoughts of other poets. There’s a little sense of someone like Gerard Manley Hopkins here, a famous nineteenth century Catholic convert whose own work was influenced by the Anglo-Saxon style. Take, for example, “The Windhover,” dedicated “To Christ our Lord”:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
But the more obvious, pertinent source here is, of course, the book of John, final gospel of the New Testament, which opens:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
Returning to Eliot, this section’s refrain — “O my people, what have I done unto thee” — comes from Micah 6:3, in which God calls out the people of Israel for their sins against Him. The passage was adapted for Good Friday liturgy in the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and other denominations, and is recited in call-and-response form as the congregation reckons with its own trespasses. And so we continue toward Easter.
The image of the seemingly inaccessible Word — “unspoken, unheard” — appears first in his earlier conversion poem, “A Song for Simeon,” with its more direct reference to “the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word.” Let’s return, though, to the obsessive quality of those Word paragraphs. Do they seem evocative not just of John, not merely of more old-fashioned poets, but — again — of something else from Eliot’s own canon? They really should.
After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
*
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
[…]
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
There’s a greater sense of stability by the time we reach Burnt Norton; even with the violence of the language, the word and Word are spoken of with more assuredness, the poetry more syntactically grounded. Still, where shall Ash Wednesday’s (W)ord be found? “Not here, there is not enough silence,” and it seems little has changed globally by Burnt Norton:
Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Meanwhile, Eliot took another rare detour into rhymed verse in section II of Little Gidding, a rumination on the heat and aridity of Blitz-era Britain that parallels rather nicely with Ash Wednesday’s desert visions “[o]f drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed”:
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
Section IV saw the introduction of another figure that returns here — the yew tree, counterpart to the roses and junipers of the earlier sections, and an ancient symbol of death and resurrection. The “veiled sister” walks among the yews, from which the wind shook whispers in section IV. The yew will later recur throughout the Quartets, in all but East Coker, suggesting time and death in section IV of Burnt Norton and V of The Dry Salvages. And, in Little Gidding V, a union of favorite symbols — and a suggestion of both immortality and ephemerality:
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration.
In a rumination on the Word, the poet’s greater use of the word seems itself transformed — converted. As Easter nears, the imagery prevalent in Eliot’s Christian works has taken root.
