26 pages • 52 minutes read
T. S. EliotAsh Wednesday
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1930A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Penitence
The speaker presents himself as penitent, that is, someone who is repentant and sorrowful regarding what he views as his sins and asks God for forgiveness. He hopes that God will hear his prayers and not condemn him always to remain separate or cut off from the divine realm.
The penitential note is perhaps most apparent in Part I. The second half of Part I touches on a number of elements in the Christian faith, including prayer, sin, judgment, and mercy. The final two lines, for example, not only invoke prayer but also echo the Christian liturgy (i.e., services and rituals that take place in church) in their solemn plea for mercy: “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death / Pray for us now and at the hour of our death” (Lines 40-41). These lines are a direct allusion to the “Hail Mary” prayer of Catholic and Anglo-Catholic tradition. In the poem, they are addressed to an as-yet unidentified figure who is asked to act as an intercessor between humanity and God both in the present moment and at the time of death, when the judgment of God will become apparent.
The speaker represents himself as being in a state of self-abnegation, a turning away from the self toward God. He no longer wants to focus his attention on the outer world, which affords him no satisfaction; instead, he is turning within in order to honor and follow the will of God. He wants to be led by God and God’s representatives as they reveal themselves to him. He is ready to follow the teachings of the Christian faith.
His reference to “us sinners” (Line 40) shows his humility and sincerity. He is not about to argue with God or to attempt to justify himself and his life. He accepts that he will be judged by God and he asks God to have mercy on him. His use of the first-person plural pronoun “us” in the liturgical passages shows that he thinks of himself as part of a religious community. It is through the teaching and rituals of the church that he and other penitents may obtain salvation, or at least so he hopes.
The penitential note returns at the end of Part III, with the liturgical lines, “Lord, I am not worthy / Lord, I am not worthy” (Lines 22-23), which repeat in different words the sentiment that was expressed in Part I. For the speaker, penitence is the first, essential step in the journey of spiritual rejuvenation he hopes to undergo.
The Spiritual Realm Versus Material Exile
From the desolation he records in Part I, the speaker discovers a reason to hope and believe in Part II, and in Part III, he pushes his way upward in a spiritual journey. In Part IV, the midpoint of the poem, he is granted a kind of dream-vision that shows him a spiritual reality that exists beyond the material and temporal world and yet also interpenetrates it.
This is likely his reward for his struggles as he ascended the spiral staircase in the previous section. Now he knows and sees divine things for himself, as the Lady/Virgin Mary reveals her divine and dynamic nature. The scene presented is obscure in some of its details, but its general outlines are clear. It seems that the Lady is walking in an ideal, well-ordered garden; she “walks between the violet and the violet” (Line 1) and “between / The various ranks of varied green” (Lines 2-3). Unspecified “others” walk with her (Line 7). The key element here is not so much the setting as the Lady’s compassion, her knowledge of “eternal dolour” (Line 6), that is, the constant presence of human sorrow and suffering. She is also a life-giving force who “made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs” (Line 8). She makes the dry rocks, a symbol of the wasteland of the material world, cool. This restorative, silent power—the “silent sister” (Line 22) never speaks—manifests through a “bright cloud of tears” (Line 17), infusing the sorrowful world with divine light.
This is how the Lady redeems time. She redeems “the unread vision in the higher dream” (Line 20), which means that without her essence streaming into time, the real nature and purpose of creation remains hidden; it is an “unread vision” that must be seen in the light of “the higher dream,” which is the vision of eternal rather than temporal things. The Lady has the power to bring life to things that seem dead, to breathe a kind of immortality into the world.
The speaker cannot maintain this vision and he does not expect to. He does not doubt the truth of it, but he knows that it is not given to mankind to maintain a permanent awareness of this “higher dream.” Some years later, in his poem “Burnt Norton,” which was one of the Four Quartets (1943), Eliot would write, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” (Section I) after a similar moment of spiritual insight. This is why this section of the poem ends with the line, “And after this our exile” (Line 29, emphasis added). Parts V and VI examine the reality of this exile and offer various pleas that it not be permanent, even “among these rocks” (Part VI, Line 31)—the wasteland of the material world.
Hope But Not Certainty
The speaker is not the kind of Christian who believes absolutely and without question that he or she is saved through acceptance of the dogmas of the church. He is more cautious and tentative than that, even though all the signs are hopeful. The speaker thus learns to embrace hope even in the absence of total certainty.
Hope is first sounded in Part II, with the introduction of the contemplative and meditative figure of the Lady—clearly a being who is close to God—who embodies “goodness” (Line 8) and love and through whom the dead, dry bones “shine with brightness” (Line 11). The speaker experiences more hope and progress as he ascends the spiral staircase in Part III, and in Part IV, he experiences a dream-vision of the Lady that shows her transformative power. However, regarding spiritual salvation for the Christian believer, the will of God will manifest in ways that cannot be known for certain in advance. This is suggested in Parts V and VI. Although these sections build on the knowledge that the speaker has accumulated, humanity also seems unable, in the speaker’s view in Part V, to hear the divine word or voice.
This accounts for the exasperation of God alluded to in the statement, “O my people, what have I done unto thee” (Line 10) and the fact that much of this section contains more questions than affirmations or spiritual revelations. For example, the speaker asks, “Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence” (Lines 11-12). Verses 3 and 4 in this section are also phrased as questions: “Will the veiled sister pray for / Those who walk in darkness” (Lines 20-21) and “Will the veiled sister pray / For children at the gate / Who will not go away and cannot pray” (Lines 24-26). There are more questions here than answers, but wrestling with such questions is presented as an aspect of the spiritual journey.
Part VI also suggests uncertainty, the possibility that the speaker will not be able to continue his spiritual awakening in the way that he might desire. Rising up inside him, he feels an attraction toward the world of nature and the senses that he seemed to have transcended in Part III, when he climbed the third stair. He speaks of the “tension” (Line 20) involved in a spiritual conversion, in which a person must renounce the individual self, with its ego and desires, and be reborn into the larger spiritual life, where the only thing that matters is the will of God. In the end he beseeches the Lady, who at this point is also the “holy mother” (Line 25), to intercede on his behalf. He has every reason to be hopeful, and his hope is reinforced by his knowledge and acceptance of the teachings of the church, but nothing can be assumed. There is still a need for divine help.
As the poem moves to its conclusion, he offers a plea to the holy mother that he and the community of believers should not be misled by a false understanding of life (Line 26). His final plea is that he should be heard by God: “And let my cry come unto Thee” (Line 35). He can only hope that such an earnest supplication will be enough to help him secure the lasting salvation his soul craves.
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