Sárospataki Füzetek 12. (2008)
2008 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: A reading of T. S. Eliot's Ashwednesday
A reading of T.S.Eliot’s Ash- Wednesday For now is the turning of the year...the fowls of the air...‘know their seasons’, and make their just return.... Every thing now turning, that we also would make it out time to turn to God in. Lancelot Andrewes, Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 16191 Introduction: the theme of‘turning’ The title of this poem tells the reader that it will be a religious meditation. It helps to know that the main themes of Ash-Wednesday in the history of the church are those of repentance and renewal. From at least the fourth century the western church decided to set the Lenten season as forty days before Easter. This is in analogy with the forty days of Christ’s fasting in the desert (Matthew 4:2). The forty days of Lent do not count the Sundays, and so Ash-Wednesday as the first day of Lent starts in the seventh week before Easter Sunday. In the early church converts prepared for baptism during this time. It will become apparent in the poem that the convert needs to turn his back toward what is transient and turn his face toward eternity. In the spirit of true self-examination the Lenten project of Eliot reminds us that turning (conversion) is never once and for all, but must be undertaken time and again. It helps for our understanding to know that the Eliot writing these words is the newly baptized member of the Anglican Church (in 1927).2 3 Recalling what he had written until then, we could say that he is turning away from the life of those in the ‘wasteland’ and the futility of those who live the lives of the ‘hollow men’, who were more dead than living in a spiritual sense, with their ‘prayers to broken stone’ and with the ‘hope only/of empty men’. These earlier poems had expressed the situation of secularized humanity, wandering away from the meaning of life lived before the face of God. Now the poet offers God his ‘dead bones’ and powerless state: ‘...these wings are no longer wings to fly/but merely vans to beat the air’.... This has been called poetic confession as psychotherapy ,3 and Eliot might agree, as long as we understand the psyche to be the soul seeking God. During the Lenten time believers are encouraged to meditate on their mortality, their sinfulness and need of forgiveness, their spiritual path in life, Frank Sawyer 1 Eliot often read and quoted from bishop Andrewes (1555-1626) frequently using some of his phrases and word-plays in his poems. 2 For an essay on Eliot’s conversion, cf. Lyndall Gordon, ‘Conversion’, from Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford University Press, 1977), reprinted in Harold Bloom, ed., T.S.Eliot - Modern Critical Reviews (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985). 3 Dennis Brown, ‘T.S.Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets: Poetic Confession as Psychotherapy’, in Literature & Theology, Vol.17, N0.1, March 2003. 65
