Sárospataki Füzetek 12. (2008)
2008 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: A reading of T. S. Eliot's Ashwednesday
Frank Sawyer my cry come unto Thee’ is also from church liturgy, as a response to the priest’s words: ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord’ (Psalm 102). We should not forget that the whole poem is essentially a prayer, though more complicated than ones we might usually whisper. Indeed, at his point of ‘turning’, the only answer to the wasteland experience and the dead end of the hollow men experience, is prayer. Prayer is the turning points1 It was a shock for the ‘lost generation’ of that time to identify with Eliot’s powerful description of cultural despair in his earlier poems, only to find him setting off in an entirely new direction - even if this was hinted at earlier. To take religious conversion seriously was a step too far for many of his admirers.32 Striving for union with God, Eliot could say, is the way of forgetting oneself and becoming open to renewal. None of this is the easy evangelism of ‘come to Jesus and he will take away your troubles’.33 Christianity for Eliot meant the ‘narrow way’ of repentance. He could say in his essays, along with Pascal, that despair is a necessary “prelude to, and element in, the joy of faith”.34 If, in the categories of Dante, The Wasteland was Eliot’s Inferno, then Ash-Wednesday is his Purgatorio, his repentance and cleansing. We have seen that a reading of the poem could more or less have a dead end in following all the references to their multi-sources. Eliot himself said that poems must be read for their first impressions and music, if they are to help us in a wholesome way. Having a deeper understanding according to the references and word-plays, and the multiple meanings of unusual phrases, allows us to re-read the poem, as some do at the beginning of Lent, in order to benefit from the central message and the rich enfolding of that message in surprising details and expressions. The poem is meant to be a turning point for the reader. It can be balanced by other poems Eliot wrote in these years, for example, the challenge to the Magi which raises the question of the sweeping impact of the Gospel on culture, but also A Song for Simeon, which expresses the calmer joy of faith - for like Simeon in Luke’s Gospel, ‘Eliot had waited long years for the coming of Jesus’,35 3 31 Spender, 134. 32 Lyndall Gordon, reprinted in Bloom, T.S.Eliot - Modern Critical Reviews, 93. 33 Schneider, 116. 34 Schneider, 117 with references to Pascal & Eliot. 33 Robert Sencourt, T.S.Eliot: A Memoir (New York: Delta, 1971), 140ft. 82
