Sárospataki Füzetek 12. (2008)
2008 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: A reading of T. S. Eliot's Ashwednesday
A READING OF T.S.ELIOT’SASH WEDNESDAY The first section of the poem began with the word ‘because’ and this word is used another ten times in part one to start a line. This frequent ‘because’ is a way of reasoning: arguments are presented by the convert as he meditates on the past, present and future. What are the choices, the limits, the goals, and the path to be taken? Eliot turns away from the futile life mentioned at the end of The Hollow Men, which takes the well known children’s song, ‘Here we go ‘round the mull berry bush’, and turns it into: ‘Here we go ‘round the prickly pear’. When we look back at Eliot’s earlier poems we see that his ironic heroes often have a failure of nerve to confront their own T and their situation. They do not make meaningful choices. Here in Ash- Wednesday the pilgrim T needs to dispossess the world, while in his prose Eliot was trying to save the world, as it were, by questioning the direction of modern culture and suggesting deeper values. But in this poem the pilgrim T learns that in the journey toward the absolute, the T is unworthy and selfeffort is not helpful:12 ‘teach us to care and not to care/teach us to sit still’, is the recipe for going forward. So what do all the ‘because’ statements add up to? They end in part one of the poem with the statement: Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Except for two question marks, this is the first stop at the end of a line in the poem. The first stop sign after thirty-nine lines. Eliot likes the flow of short and medium length lines, which twist and turn the meaning faster than the reader can catch at a first reading. Indeed, the first reading is meant to catch our ear for the music and general themes without in any way hoping to illuminate all the details. A study of the hidden meanings is useful so we can reread this poem with more insight, but we must not lose our delight in the cadence and dynamics. Then the poem can be read again at each new Lent with new impressions and new insights. These new insights are available because the multiple meanings and the high density of implications are not spelled out by the poet; the purposeful vagueness which hints at known symbols places these in a new setting, creating intended ambiguities. The poem then is like a bird with two wings: both the writer and the reader need to cooperate in spelling out some of the thoughts and their implications. The suggestion of section one is that we are ‘to care and not to care’. We are to care about that which has eternal value and not about what detracts us from this path. The prayer: ‘Teach us to sit still’ refers to the passive way Eliot, namely, the breaking up of his marriage because of Vivienne’s psychological state of mind and her eventual consignment to an institution. 12 Cf. John Kwan-Terry, ‘Ash-Wednesday: a poetry of verification’, in A.David Moody, ed., The Cambridge Companion to T.S.Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 132ff. 69
