Sárospataki Füzetek 12. (2008)

2008 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: A reading of T. S. Eliot's Ashwednesday

A READING OFT.S.ELIOTSASH WEDNESDAY

to refer to divine grace as the necessary ingredient to find redemption. The ‘rose’ in Dante and in Eliot can have the meaning of beauty, joy, and visionary memories or expectations. In Dante the rose is used to symbolize the communion of the saints, as in his Paradiso where the redeemed are gathered together as petals forming a white rose. Eliot later returned to this theme in Burnt Norton. Here, in Ash-Wednesday the rose is the special agent of salvation within the rose garden. But woven into this are personal memories, as well as the memoria sancta which restores spiritual life.

Part two ends with the bones under the juniper tree happy and singing. In his puzzling way, the poet writes:

Under the juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

This may seem to be salvation through forgetfulness, but we already know that the question: ‘Shall these bones live?’, has a positive answer. What looks like death is a step toward salvation. The bones of Ezekiel 37:1-14 are also the bones which can say ‘this is the land’ (Ezekiel 48:29). Eliot uses references as preferences. He is writing his own prophetic material, with a re-interpretive use of Ezekiel. The question is whether we have the ‘land’, or only have the ‘sand’. Bones may be happy to merely inherit the sand, but Eliot is also saying that the divine plan includes spiritual restoration, pictured bodily in Ezekiel 37, and in biblical New Testament terms as bodily resurrection. However this may all turn out, Eliot is not content to end with the desert as inheritance. The desert in the Bible - in the history of Israel, the life of Jesus, the life of the early church - is the place of waiting for God, a time of temptation and renewal. The desert is not enough and the ‘via negativa’ is not the whole story: Eliot also speaks in this section of the poem about the garden as a symbol of new life. The ‘cool of day’ is a reminder of Genesis 3:8. He is not so much dwelling on the end, as on the ‘turning’, the beginning of the path forward, the first step of which is the renewal of the soul, and thus gradually the renewal of daily life. Tillich explains this theme as follows:

Man, in actualising himself, turns to himself and away from God in knowledge, will, and emotion. ...For Augustine, sin is the love which desires finite goods for their own sake and not for the sake of the ultimate good. ...Love of one’s self and one’s world is distorted if it does not penetrate through the finite to its infinite ground.20

20 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 54f.

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