Critics have often viewed the work of T.S. Eliot through the lens of his conversion to “Anglo-Catholicism” in 1927. His most famous poems, Prufrock, The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men, written before his conversion, and frequently labeled “pre-conversion works,” share a common theme of isolation from the divine, a questioning of both God’s existence and power. In these works God is either absent or impotent, and unwilling, or unable, to provide the salvation Eliot seeks. The conversion from unbeliever to believer occurs in Eliot’s poetry at Ash Wednesday (1930), not only his most religious poem, but perhaps also his most beautiful (others, I’m sure, will argue for Four Quartets). Although not his first “Christian” poem [see Journey of the Magi, (1920)], Ash Wednesday is the first of Eliot’s poems in which the speaker embarks on a journey of renunciation and penitence; a “turn” that is in the tradition of Biblical conversions, signaling his acceptance of an authority capable of achieving man’s eternal salvation.
All Biblical conversions share a similar narrative structure. The essential step in these narratives is “to turn,” a figurative shift away from a life of sin towards the light of God or Jesus Christ. Though belief is fundamental, it is not sufficient in itself; necessary to all Biblical conversions, Old or New Testament, is a realization of trespass followed by repentance and a commitment to obey the word of God or carry out the works of Jesus. Both realization and commitment are represented by the turn. In the Greek New Testament, the word denoting this turn is Epistrepho, which functions flexibly—to turn, bring back, return—in a variety of contexts. Epistrepho applies to all manner of conversions: non-believer to believer (Saul of Tarsus); lax adherent to devoted disciple (King David); and conversions of entire nations: “O Israel, return unto the Lord thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity. Take with you words and turn to the Lord: say unto him, Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously: so we render the calves of our lips.” (Hosea 14:1-2) Epistrepho can also function as a “de-conversion,” or turn away from God: “But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?” (Galatians 4:9) What Epistrepho represents is devotion: to turn either way, towards or away from god, is to engage the one and to deny its other. Devotion to God, or a turn towards God, necessitates renunciation of sin; sin is thereby a turn away from God.
Epistrepho in the Biblical conversion narrative is preceded by a fall away from God or Jesus Christ. This fall is precipitated by sin; and just as belief is not sufficient enough in itself to guarantee conversion, mere agnosticism is too benign to warrant a turn. The convert must always have something to turn away from. Paul’s conversion to Christianity (from Saul of Tarsus) takes place on the road to Damascus, where he is traveling with orders from the high priest of Jerusalem to arrest followers of the crucified Jesus Christ and deliver them for trial. His sin is not merely one of “unbeliever,” but also of “persecutor,” “blasphemer,” and “injurer.” It is his unbelief, however, that leads Paul to commit his more injurious Material sins and the perniciousness of these sins, known to Ananias as evil, is what leads to his conversion: “But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.” (Acts 9:15-16)
At the core of Eliot’s pre-conversion work is unbelief. This unbelief is not a disinterested or enthusiastic atheism; it represents a lack of faith in any authority, divine or otherwise, to provide salvation (or even relief) to the modern human condition; a condition Eliot sees as both broken and damaging. It is an unbelief rife with despair and longing. In Eliot’s first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), this unbelief manifests itself in various forms of disenchantment, all leading to some kind of estrangement from the communion of man (That is not what I meant at all/That is not it, at all”); in Poems (1920), the unbelief leads to the poet embarking on a fully fledged attack on the Church; while in the Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925) Eliot details a rupture in both worldly and divine authority, and the unbelief precipitates Eliot’s complete fall away from God, which is, in the context of the Biblical conversion narrative, the greatest sin of all. Yet at the very end of The Hollow Men, unquestionably Eliot’s darkest work, there arrives a glimmer of hope: the next to last stanza of the poem, a fractured and broken incantation of the ending of the Lord’s prayer, at the very least represent an intent to turn:
For thine
For Life is
For Thine is the
This intent to turn at the darkest hour is a common feature within the Biblical conversion narrative. King Manasseh, known for doing “evil in the sight of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 33:2) and making “Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to err, and to do worse than the heathen, whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel” (2 Chronicles 33:9), converts while awaiting death in a prison in Babylon: “And when he was in affliction, he besought the Lord his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and prayed unto him: and he was intreated of him.” (2 Chronicles 33 12-13)
If The Hollow Men represents the darkest hour, then the light arrives in Ash Wednesday. Eliot’s conversion, however, is neither instant nor effortless. Ash Wednesday is not the flash of light that blinds Saul on the road to Damascus; rather, it is a series of turns (or attempts to turn), full of doubt and uncertainty, more closely resembling the conversion of the Apostle Peter. The poem takes its title from the first day of the liturgical season of Lent—a season of penitence and fasting carried out in order to prepare for the days of Christ’s passion and resurrection; and thus, Christian salvation. The Ash Wednesday sermon states that: “Lent provided a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy Baptism... a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church. Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and their faith.”
The title alludes not only to Eliot’s conversion, but also his awareness that salvation is achieved by continual repentance and renewal of faith. This necessity for the Christian to continually renew his or her faith is compatible with Eliot’s conception of time (explored more fully in Four Quartets). For Eliot, there are two streams of time: time temporal, in which we must live and which cannot be redeemed (the past forever disappearing, the future forever being born, and the present being renewed by the moment); and timelessness. The temporal represents the physical or sensual; and timelessness represents the spiritual. There are moments when these two streams of time intersect; however, during the speaker’s initial turn, both his sensual and spiritual entities exist in (and are thereby incapacitated by) time temporal:
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always place
And what is actual is actual for only one time
And only one place.
It is only after the speaker of Ash Wednesday has turned on the stairs in Part III, and made his way through purgatory, that temporal and eternal time intersect; facing God, time is now able to be redeemed “restoring/With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem/The time./Redeem the unread vision in the higher dream.” Eliot’s conception of the multiplicity of time correlates with the Biblical conversion narrative. Once Eliot has completed his turn, he must look back down the stairs at his former self:
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 despair.
The speaker is looking back upon his other self, to see his self in the past, a different self still reliant on “hope and despair,” a self in conflict with his current self, but a self which must remain a part of him. This duality of the individual entirely aligns to the Biblical conversion narrative: Paul, when proselytizing Christianity, does not deny his former self, he preaches that he had been a sinner and persecutor of the church, and that it was his turn towards Jesus that had granted him salvation. Paul is at once both Saul the persecutor and St. Paul the proselytizer, the former very much a part of the latter. The biblical conversion narrative relies upon the past being ineradicable; as it is in much need of the pre-conversion figure as it is the post-conversion figure.
The opening of Ash Wednesday is fraught with despair. The speaker renounces earthly pleasures and human wisdom from the material world: “Because I cannot drink/There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again,” but has not yet acquired the ability to know God or Christ (and perhaps never will): “Because I know I shall not know/the one veritable transitory power.” The turn has left him stranded, much like the Apostle Peter when he is asked by Jesus to walk along the water, the speaker must leave all that he knows, all that is real, for something that he can never fully understand; any hesitation and he will sink. It is this helplessness, however, that prepares the speaker for spiritual dependence, thereby allowing him to complete his turn: “Because these wings are no longer wings to fly/But merely vans to beat the air.” True to the conversion narrative, it is the convert’s weakness that enables him to most closely turn to god.
This recognition of the difficulty in sustaining a true conversion in a temporal world is evident from the first line: “Because I do not hope to turn again”; the speaker, having already turned, is not certain he can preserve his turn indefinitely; the uncertainty implied in the use of “I do not hope” in place of the more assured “I will not.” This doubt is echoed in the parallelism of the first three lines; the speaker in his repetition is attempting an incantation of sorts; to conjure faith from the emptiness of the waste land. The repetition and echo used throughout Part 1 of Ash Wednesday, give the opening a feel of a sermon or liturgy. A common feature of Eliot’s poetry is that the form of a poem is mimetic of its theme: Prufrock’s inconsistent meter and imbalanced structure; full of end, internal and slant rhymes is much like the protagonist’s mind;, matching The Waste Land’s theme of fracture and the rupture of authority is reflected in its fragmented narrative; The Hollow Men’s distress is matched by the austerity and starkness of language and their short, severe lines. The use of clear end rhymes in Part 1 of Ash Wednesday, evidence a measure of conformity to some kind of authority. Though not subservient to any strict pattern, the rhyme is a step towards obedience.
The structure of the first line is also significant: as a subordinate clause, it allows for the remainder of the poem to be a response to or an explanation for why the speaker does not hope to turn again. Gone is the fragmentation found in Prufrock and The Waste Land; Ash Wednesday, though riddled with doubt and uncertainty, is focused: there is one theme presented, clearly demarcated; one consistent voice; a destination both speaker and poem aim to reach. An arduous journey it may be, but Eliot is no longer wandering lost in a spiritual desert.
Here is Jeremy Irons reading T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday:
Thank you Thomas Moody for your explication of a poem I've always loved. And also, thanks for the link to the inspiring performance of the poem by Jeremy Irons; a case where the inclusion of piano accompaniment adds to the meditative atmosphere rather than distracting.
Posted by: Peter Fortunato | February 17, 2018 at 08:25 AM