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The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.1 (2004) 193-214



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Ash Wednesday and the Land between Dying and Birth

John Cunningham and Jason Peters


Ash Wednesday throughout holds together the vagaries of any sentient Christian soul in a kind of timeless moment. The soul ever knows at once her Ash Wednesday and also ever rejoices at the brink of Easter. Or, in other words, the soul "walk[s] in darkness" (163) of Good Friday renunciations and, paradoxically, also stands at the brink of Resurrection "white light" (134) that is the goal of the fast. Though compounded of discrete experiences that analysis may discover, the soul's hidden life is one, a unity. Bold to enter upon such a great mystery, Eliot preserves it by refusing chronology, by invoking the elusive "Lady" (or ladies), by using deliberately indeterminate imagery, by risking syntactical impertinences, and by a mixing of tenses (and therefore of times) in sections, and even in parts of sections. Seeing these as pointers to mystery rather than as cruxes to be solved leads one closer to the heart of the poem. A soul's pilgrimage is never straightforward. Yet Eliot offers an account remarkable for its insight into the life of the soul. We shall discuss the poem from its own point of view so far as we can imagine ourselves into it.

In Four Quartets, Eliot proposes that a soul's [End Page 193] being does not suffer a sequential order of events; Time Past and Time Present and Time Future are "perhaps" ever existent to the soul. To chart the movements of the religious life in Ash Wednesday is to draw indeed a spiral graph: as at every turn "the weak spirit quickens to rebel" (197) and as at every turn she finds herself "spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed" (183). Every moment is the time between dying to the old and being born to the new. Moreover, the verb tense of parts I and VI is present and pertains to the protagonist; that of the rest of the poem is past, except where the poet generalizes to include all people in the present tense. Eliot will not speak of chronological causation, but rather ties the poem to the Church's cycle of worship; but the only unity in the poem is the multifarious life of the soul.

That soul does walk (115) and climb (116); yet the poem begins with "turn" (1, 3, 23), an allusion to the Ash Wednesday liturgy, and ends with another allusion to that same rite—"and let my cry come unto Thee" (219). Likewise, the speaker approaches Communion, saying, "Lord, I am not worthy" (117); and yet the poem draws to an end with the private supplication following Communion—"Suffer me not to be separated" (218)—that names the most dreadful exile of all. The termination of Ash Wednesday, if we need have such, is that the soul must be prepared to live every day as if it were Ash Wednesday and also to live every day as if at the verge of Easter.

Part I closes with a fragment from the Hail Mary, the prayer repeated fifty times in each recitation of the Rosary; and in that devotion one may meditate upon the Joyful Mysteries, or the Sorrowful Mysteries, or the Glorious Mysteries. The salutation also begins the Angelus, said three times each day as the church bell rings at dawn, at noon, and at dusk; moreover, that prayer includes the enigmas of Annunciation, Christmas, Crucifixion, Easter, and the Last Judgment, though certainly not in that sequence. In this allusion alone is the entire life of the soul. In On Christian Doctrine, Saint Augustine takes the biblical metaphor of the exiled pilgrim to describe each soul's complete life on earth; yet Augustine speaks less of the beginning and the end of the pilgrimage than he does of the soul's constant temptations to choose a vehicle (one of God's good but alluring creatures) instead of electing the distant end to which the vehicle...

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