Sárospataki Füzetek 12. (2008)

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

Frank Sawyer

the soul prepares to accept God, as described by the Spanish mystic St. John of the cross (i542-9i).13 The last lines are a prayer from the liturgy of Lent:

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

It has been said about Ash-Wednesday,

Structurally, Eliot built the poem on a phrase from Bishop Andrewes about the ‘two turnings’ which Andrewes had declared were necessary for a ‘conversion’. The one turning looked ahead to God; the other, appropriate for a penitential season, looked back to one’s sinful past. The style of Eliot’s poem is simple and lucid, but its meaning is complicated and difficult. Ash-Wednesday combines intense personal emotions, often obscure to the reader, with the formal use of liturgical texts. It is the story of Eliot’s conversion, both public and private - with all his scepticism and doubts still there, offered to GodJ4

Part two

The second section gets us into the stronger issues of repentance: the bones must die. At the same time dead bones reviving to life again is a well- known theme from Ezekiel chapter 37. Eliot works with this theme:

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live?

The leopards may be an echo of the three beasts at the beginning of Dante’s Inferno, but they have their own role here. The white leopards are beautiful and the colour white in this poem makes them holy - for their work is to sanctify. There is no statement about blood colouring their necks and paws, even though they have done the work of cleaning the flesh off the bones. Apparently they have cleaned their own fur, too. All of this signifies a spiritual cleansing. The parts specifically mentioned are chosen to represent a variety of human aspects and skills: legs (activity), heart (emotion), liver (sensuality) and skull (thought). Other details are also carefully chosen: the white bones, white leopards and Lady in while, refers to purity. Only when we have died to the ‘flesh’ may we live truly in a spiritual way. It is worth noting that dying to the flesh, in the biblical view, means more than controlling carnal desires. It 13 14

13 Another reference could be to Blaise Pascal (1623-62) who made the famous statement that ‘all the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still’.

14 Alzina Stone Dale, T.S.Eliot - The Philosopher Poet (Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1988), 102.

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