T.S. Eliot Materialized

“It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost” and to her, to order there shall be a solemn set return once in the year at least. And reason; for once a year all things turn. And that once is now at this time, for now at this time is the turning of the year. In Heaven, the sun in his equinoctial line, the zodiac and all the constellations in it, do now turn about to the first point. The earth and all her plants, after a dead winter, return to the first and best season of the year. The creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtle, and the crane and the stork, “know their seasons,” and make their just return at this time every year. Every thing now turning, that we also would make it our time to turn to God in.

—Lancelot Andrewes, “Of Repentance and Fasting”

For penitence and humility, as is suitable to remember at Mid-Lent, are the foundation of the Christian life.

—T.S. Eliot, a sermon preached at Cambridge University, March 7, 1948

Acceptance is more important than anything that can be called belief. There is almost a definite moment of acceptance at which the New Life begins.

—T.S. Eliot, Dante

I. Turning

The plain facts:

Conversion.

Ash-Wednesday.

Lancelot Andrewes’s Lenten sermons.

The prominence of the word “turn” in Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, from the first line of the first poem (“Because I do not hope to turn”), through the turnings on the turning stairs in the third, to the opening of the sixth poem (“Although I do not hope to turn”).1

The turning the reader must do in the first editions of Ash-Wednesday in order to reach those first words: after the front free endpaper, a blank page, followed by another blank, a half-title page, then the title page, the dedication (to the poet’s wife), and another half-title page.

The reader thus joins the poet in literally turning.

Many readers, however, emphasizing Eliot’s recent formal turn to Christianity, the Church of England, and in particular Anglo-Catholicism (as he announced two years before Ash-Wednesday in the preface to his essays For Lancelot Andrewes),2 think that the poet has arrived at some state of finality and stasis, whereby turning will no longer be necessary and is, in fact, undesirable. To turn to Christianity means, for them, a transcendence of earthly “turnings,” including those that Bishop Andrewes describes as characteristic of the Lenten season (in the epigraph above). To have accepted Christianity means, for such readers (and their numbers appear to be Legion), both a rejection of turning and a transcendence of earthly delights and pleasures.

And yet in having to turn page after page after page in order to reach the book in which all this is represented, the reader engages in a literal, physical act that mirrors what “spiritualist” interpreters regard Eliot as opposing, which is turning. They may also miss the accrued difference between “Because” and “Although” in the opening verses of the first and sixth poems, respectively—a critical difference available to and revealed by such comparison as the poem pointedly invites. Whereas the former points to resignation, the latter is positive in its guarded affirmativeness. In fact, as I shall argue in the pages that follow, Ash-Wednesday dramatizes a turn in its speaker—not to be simply identified with the poet himself—away from resignation, stillness, and separation from those turns that nature everywhere shows off in springtime, and toward those very signs of creation, renewal, and joy, signified in “the salt savour of the sandy earth” that the final poem features in its depiction of the five senses and their receptiveness and response. The turn that Ash-Wednesday endorses and celebrates is not, as commonly supposed, toward transcendence but, rather, Incarnational, toward immanence as that in, through, and by means of which transcendence may be reached—without ever, however, leaving the things of this world behind. Immanence thus becomes mediational, a point highlighted in the poems’ central dramatizations of the Virgin, everywhere represented as both one thing and another.

The place to begin a reading of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems may well be with the “Lady of silences,” who closely resembles Mary and yet is said in II not to be Her (since “She honours the Virgin in meditation”). She it is whom the speaker addresses in prayer at the end of the final poem: “Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden.” We first encounter her in II, along with those “three white leopards” “under a juniper tree / In the cool of the day”—her “goodness” and “loveliness” are stressed. Moreover, the “dissembled” bones (about which more directly) declare that they “shine with brightness” because of the Lady’s goodness, incarnate in her honoring of the Virgin. Soon follows a lengthy description of her, made of paradox, which she also embodies. What could be plainer or more obvious—it seems that here, as elsewhere, Eliot simplifies, becoming direct and making it relatively easy for his grateful reader: she is, for example, both “calm” and “distressed,” as well as “Exhausted” and “life-giving.” Verses here point unmistakably to the Lady’s mediational character, rhyming, as we shall soon have occasion to discuss, with the opening verses of V, which focus on while distinguishing Word and word. We have already observed that it is to the Lady that the speaker prays, as he does in some detail in V.

The thing is, fallen, inevitably sinning humankind needs—that is, requires—a mediator, whose work takes place in the turn between differences and especially opposites.

That Eliot chose to call his work Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems is another plain fact that counts for something. Together, they make a whole, of course, obviously, and yet the first three were published separately: II as “Salutation” in the Saturday Review of Literature, December 1927; I as “Perch’io Non Spero” in Commerce, Spring 1928; and III, also in Commerce, Autumn 1929, bearing the title “Som de L’Escalina.” The three remaining poems were added to make the whole, the first, limited edition appearing in London on April 24, 1930, the trade edition five days later, and the American first edition not until September 26, 1930 (although 400 of the 600 copies of the UK limited edition were intended for sale in the United States).3 As publication history shows, Ash-Wednesday, being literally put together, made out of several poems, is an amalgamation, just as are Four Quartets, the individual essays constituting The Sacred Wood (notably including the influential “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), and even “The Hollow Men,” short as it is.

My point is, we can expect too much of that “whole,” too much consistency and straight-line development, precisely the sort of expectation that Eliot himself warned us about in his preface to Perse’s Anabasis, itself first published, in London, on May 22, 1930, not quite a month after Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems was published. Thanks to these facts, we are further alerted to the possibility—you have to compare—that a difference might appear between I–III and IV–VI, a possibility borne out, in fact. Perhaps accordingly, that turn is mirrored in a turn in the speaker himself.

That speaker, I have already suggested, should not be simply identified with the poet T.S. Eliot, whose “conversion poem” Ash-Wednesday is very often said to be. To be sure, it is his first long poem following his conversion, but as I have attempted to show in previous books, and as commentators such as the biographer Lyndall Gordon have likewise maintained, important signs of Christian understanding are present as early as the mid-1910s, long before he formally embraced Anglo-Catholicism.4 I do not think that a turn in Eliot appears in the six poems he finally published together as Ash-Wednesday. The speaker is quite another matter. We should also keep in mind what Eliot says about conversion in his 1948 sermon at Cambridge, denying that anyone “ever attempted to convert me” and acknowledging that “for me the strongest outside influences were negative” and hinting that, thanks to Montaigne, for one, he may have been influenced “by pursuing scepticism to its utmost limit.” In any case, he says, “Observation of the futility of non-Christian lives has its part; and also realization of the incredibility of every alternative to Christianity that offers itself.”⁵ The point is, in any case, that being converted to the world is structurally of a piece with being converted from it. Both are incomplete, perhaps equally so from the perspective of Incarnation.

The speaker in Ash-Wednesday is not in desperate straits at the beginning, but he is resigned to no longer “turning”: no longer striving to “strive towards such things.” Because he does not “hope to turn again,” he will not know again “The infirm glory of the positive hour,” and he knows that he will not know “The one veritable transitory power”: “Because I cannot drink / There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again.” Possibilities hold promise, but the speaker is denied them precisely because he will not be able “to turn again.”

What prevents him is one of those “falsehoods” that VI says “mock ourselves.” It is decidedly un-Christian; indeed, it is anti-Christian, although many readers do not recognize it as such. The passage is crucial; Four Quartets points its difference, and later in Ash-Wednesday we find a direct repudiation. The terms alone that the speaker uses in I are enough to distance us from him, establishing him as unreliable, in fact, sadly mistaken, an adherent to an asceticism and transcendentalism that represents (but) half-understanding—in the speaker’s repetitions I detect some of the same whining that marks the wastelander-speaker’s mistaken desire for water in the fifth section of that earlier work. He believes that “what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place.” He thus rejoices, while renouncing “the blessed face” and “the voice.” He also “construct[s]” something himself so that he will have something to rejoice about. The speaker thus misses the Incarnational fact of “attendance,” whereby each moment in every place is “intersected” with another time and another place. Renouncing “the blessed face” is tantamount to rejecting necessary mediation, via the Virgin, which is the whole point of Eliot’s efforts here. The speaker does, actually, become desperate, come to “rejoice”—but that by means of relying on himself for the creation of “something / Upon which to rejoice.”

By the end of I, the speaker shows some right thinking, in turning—note the irony—to prayer for mercy. He is also aware, importantly, that he discusses too much such matters with himself and explains “too much.” There is just a glimpse, in other words, that perhaps surface matters and the literal holds out possibility denied to inveterate plunges into depths. We easily become addicted, as it were, to “thorough-going.”

The second poem of Ash-Wednesday shifts focus, away from the self-indulgent if not solipsistic speaker, who, however, represents his own “dissembling”; that is, he is literally dismembered, parts of himself separated out (eventually, Ash-Wednesday will pray “not to be separated”). But “Because of the goodness of this Lady,” her “loveliness,” and her honoring of the Virgin “in meditation,” the “dissembled” bones “chirp” and “shine with brightness.” I admit that much of what follows, until the depiction of the Lady’s paradoxical nature, is elusive. In any case, as promising as that Lady is, and as helpful and effective as she has already been, the speaker records at the end of II that “the bones sang, scattered and shining,” and that “We are glad to be scattered,” a position that the poem later roundly rejects. By now, though, we are in a position to interpret the “dissembling” as pointing to elimination of the flesh and, in relation to I, such disembodiment that comes, willy-nilly, with renunciation.

The poem’s speaker in thus being “scattered” in II reveals a separation that itself relates to his renunciations in I: he neither enjoys nor knows of “necessarye coniunction.” The last verse paragraph of II does, however, put the matter in general context that at once summarizes the “intellectual” movement of the poem so far and looks forward to the parts that follow. We return, from the Lady, to those “dissembled” bones. There is further resignation here—and there are, perhaps, two different speakers, established by the dizzying turn and return, from “we” to “they” on to “ye” and back, at the end, to “we.” Unity and division emerge as the issue, in other words, bringing together as/into one or separating one from another. There is no room, thus, for such paradox as the Lady represents and incarnates, no acceptance of such tension as is manifest in harmony—about which more directly.

The third poem of Ash-Wednesday represents another turn on the poem’s part as it chronicles the speaker engaged in a series of inevitable turns: three stairs, at least two of which themselves turn, in addition to the speaker’s own turning and, “At the second turning of the second stair,” a horrible scene, with “twisting, turning” of “the devil of the stair” and apparently “faces” and figures monstrous, one or more wearing “The deceitful face of hope and of despair.” I think it useless, and possibly detrimental, to follow the speaker and engage in prolonged discussion and attempted explanation regarding these figures.

“At the first turning of the third stair” a window gives onto a complex scene. There is “enchantment,” which at least initially appears positive, coupled as it is with “the fig’s fruit” and the music of “an antique flute.” But then comes a Prufrock-like mention of blown, brown hair, said to be “sweet,” said to be “Distraction.” The poem ends on a promising though compromised note, with the speaking voice admitting in prayer his unworthiness and asking that “the word only” be spoken. If the first two lines—that is, the prayer—represent healthy recognition, rather than resignation, the last appears a throwback, a request not desperate, to be sure, but misguided; its understanding clashes with the representation of the Lady: “Speech without word and / Word of no speech.” The speaker, in other words, desires a spoken word—and only that—knowing nothing of that “Word” that is “of no speech.” It is a subtle point, but one, I contend, that is plain and clear—as long as one stays with the words themselves and compares; that is to say, following Eliot as he describes reading Lancelot Andrewes: “dwelling on a single word, comparing its use in its nearer and in most remote contexts.”6

II. Critical difference

Just here commentary must register a difference from the poem, from the primary text. I offer, that is to say, a mediational section absent from Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. Commentary thus does not mirror poem, not exactly, anyway. The divergence is necessary because my work here is (obviously) lesser than Eliot’s, to which, its onlie begetter, it remains indebted for its very being. The poem can do what commentary cannot, the latter requiring elaboration there not needed.

Unlike The Waste Land and, differently, Four Quartets, Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday does not chronicle a “journey toward understanding,” that motif perhaps stemming from The Odyssey, which consists of the hero’s spiritual and intellectual voyage from darkness to light, self-serving to other-directedness, pride to humility.7 The chief means of change is a descent to what the Greeks understood as the Kingdom of the Dead. In Ash-Wednesday there is neither physical journey, typically present as a mirror of the inner journey underway, nor descent: in other words, no plunging into the deep, well below the surface. It is not even clear that the six poems have a single speaker; whether they do or do not may not much matter. Seeking unity as well as deep meaning, we modern readers expect, and therefore tend to find, more or less straightforward development, “progress,” and psychologically and spiritually explicable causes for perceived change in the speaker. On the literal level in this poem, however, none is readily available. In fact, Ash-Wednesday often seems bent on frustrating our attempts to simplify it, reduce it, or round it off. I think the poem is sophisticated in its “verse” and simple(r) in its “ancient rhyme.”

I mean, being literature and not theology or philosophy or psychology, Ash-Wednesday represents lived experience; in doing so, moreover, the poem focuses not on belief but on understanding, an altogether different matter, involving heart and soul and feelings as well as will and that perhaps indescribable thing that entails surrender—or transcendence—of the mind and the sensibility. The emphasis falls, in still other words, on the known and on what can be known, on acceptance of mindful recognition instead of mind-less delivery of the self. Despite our Romantic and modern wishes, desires, and expectations, there may be no epiphantic moment, no sudden insight. That, I think Eliot came to realize, is a pagan notion. The Christian is less dramatic, perhaps, and for Eliot it all involves a series of lived experiences culminating in acceptance, the intellectual and volitional version of self-surrender. Faith is the result of such experience as Ash-Wednesday dramatizes, not its cause.

At least, that is what Eliot (also) appears to be saying in two other key texts from roughly the same time as Ash-Wednesday. One of these is the book Dante, which Eliot published on September 27, 1929, and which—it is really an extended essay—he included as the geographical center of the Selected Essays, published in 1932. I quoted the most relevant passage as an epigraph above; it comes at the end of the third section of Dante, which focuses on the Vita Nuova.⁸ The other key text I refer to is W.F. Trotter’s translation of Pascal’s Pensées, which includes an extended introduction by Eliot and which appeared on September 19, 1931. There, Eliot offers a sustained account of “the process of the mind of the intelligent believer.” It is, I believe, the closest he ever came to a direct statement of his own spiritual autobiography, an account that rhymes with Ash-Wednesday in both particulars and spirit.

The Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminates in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory: among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by what Newman calls “powerful and concurrent” reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation.9

This is the crux of the matter: according to Four Quartets, “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”¹⁰ Everything—literally—revolves around this center, the pattern without which there is no meaning (of course, without movement the pattern could be neither perceived nor existent). Continuing, Eliot turns to the “unbeliever”:

To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to “preserve values”. He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called “saintliness” are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the “reality” of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no great value. The unbeliever starts from the other end, and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter.¹¹

Elsewhere, Eliot lays to rest—or at least attempts to do so—the prevalent notion that faith or belief means the transcendence of doubt. Furthermore, Eliot’s last sentence here bears a sting that only close attention to its words reveals: as Ash-Wednesday, for one text, reveals, there is and can be no “going straight to the heart of the matter.”

III. Acceptance

In the fourth poem of the six that make up Ash-Wednesday, my students almost always detect a difference, a change, a turn—even if they have a difficult time identifying it. I think the tone is different, the texture more fluid. The poem returns here to the Lady, again distinct—though not separated—from the Virgin, whose white and blue “colour” she wears. Here, too, she is represented as paradoxical, as instancing “necessarye coniunction”: “Talking of trivial things / In ignorance and in knowledge of eternal dolour.” And here, the speaker, borrowing from another favorite of Ezra Pound, the medieval Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, advises us to “be mindful”: “Sovegna vos.” It is excellent advice for the reader of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, perhaps especially pointed and poignant in (also) recalling such Oriental understanding as the earlier poems show to be a “falsehood.” In addition occur words that apply to Eliot’s own poetry from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Four Quartets; they are all bent on “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme,” harmonizing traditional and old, on one hand, and new, on the other.

I detect in IV a subtle difference, one that I have not seen remarked before. In II, as we have observed, emphasis falls on “and,” in particular the way of incarnating differences and apparent opposites seen in the Lady. Here, in IV, while she still appears in terms of “and,” as I have noted, there is a turn from that conjunction to the preposition “between”: thus, “Who walked between the violet and the violet / Who walked between / The various ranks of green . . . ?” and “The silent sister veiled in white and blue / Between the yews . . ..” The reference to “flutes” “rhymes” with the earlier mention of that “antique flute” that may be mainly a “Distraction.” Years, then, bring a greater capacity to be mindful. Moreover, movement is here (similarly) positive, linked, obviously, with turning. “Restoring,” furthermore, takes on importance since the word reappears, twice. Falsehoods and distractions proliferate, but the Mediator as Deity, this “between” figure, restores “the ancient rhyme,” albeit “With a new verse.” Finally, instead of dwelling on himself, discussing matters with himself “too much” and explaining “too much,” the speaker—if he is the same—in IV turns outward, precisely toward (the possibility of) “Redeem[ing] / The time.”

“The silent sister,” we now read here, is not just “Between the yews,” but also “behind the Garden god, / Whose flute is breathless.” This idea of silence, now clearly emphasized, is further enhanced as we are told that she “signed but spoke no word.” Evidently as a result of her action—we recall the effectiveness of the Lady in II—“the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down / Redeem the time, redeem the dream / The token of the word unheard, unspoken[.]” The “dream” obviously hearkens back to that earlier in IV, where “jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse,” which needed to be redeemed, perhaps by means of an “ancient rhyme” restored “With a new verse.”

The fifth, penultimate poem opens with a succinct, precise exposition of the Word and its relation at once to word and world, an account that might—if we were not mindful—be taken as gibberish. For it sounds that way. Interestingly, it is followed immediately by verses plain and simplistic. Eliot is, it seems clear, engaging his reader in comparing, as well as in being mindful. The plain verses, it turns out, are bathetic; it is they that say virtually nothing; they thus constitute much of the noise that drowns out “the spoken word,” speaking loudly. It is the earlier, quieter verses that are highly charged with meaning (to adapt Ezra Pound’s helpful definition of poetry).

In the opening of V, which bears an apparent debt to Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot appears to be playing with words: “If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent / If the unheard, unspoken / Word is unspoken, unheard,” yet “Still” there is “the Word unheard,” the Word now lacking a word, the Word that is “within / The world and for the world.” In such darkness as marks our world, the light yet shines. Charge derives from these words’ invited comparison with earlier rhymes, earlier representations in Ash-Wednesday. The Word speaks when It is not “heard,” even when It lacks a word. Moreover, the Word is within the world, and for it, “unstilled” and “whirling” as it is. This is a powerful—and clear—statement, reminiscent in style, manner, and content of Bishop Andrewes, with whom it rhymes. The speaker who earlier sought the spoken word “only” thus appears as mistaken as he who renounced “the blessed face” and “the voice.” The real speaking comes from the “Lady of silences,” who “signed but spoke no word” (italics added).

Following the excursus on Word, word, and world—an interesting trinity in itself, with the human-but-turnable “word” in between, as possible mediator—come lines bathetic and sophomoric, bearing the texture of the worst greeting-card verse. This is perhaps the most obvious and most extensive comparing that Ash-Wednesday invites. The rhyming, especially, is embarrassing, but so is the empty “content”; indeed, both senses of “rhyme” are in play, sound and content alike being not just awkward but also incompetent (not on Eliot’s part, of course). The questions are, nevertheless, relevant and critical. Where will “the word”—not, now, the Word—be heard, where there is a lack of silence: “Not on the sea or on the islands, not / On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land.” The versifying continues: “Both in the day time and in the night time / The right time and the right place are not here / No place of grace for those who avoid the face / No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice[.]” The lines embody the noise—the drowning-out of (even) “the word”—being described. The last two lines, of course, urge comparison with the speaker’s self-description in the first poem.

After this verse paragraph, the fifth poem turns, for the first time, to “the veiled sister” and presents her, as we have seen earlier, as “between” (e.g., “the veiled sister between the slender / Yew trees”)—it matters, of course, that yews traditionally represent both mortality and immortality. Now, at any rate, the concern is whether “the veiled sister” will pray for “Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between / Hour and hour, word and word, power and power . . . ?” Those conflicted figures thus share her “betweenness,” just as she shares ours. She is, after all, our “sister.”

In the last poem of Ash-Wednesday, to my way of thinking one of the most beautiful and most powerful that Eliot ever penned, there returns the characterization of humankind as in-between. It is not just the speaker who is between, but all of us: “Wavering between the profit and the loss / In this brief transit where the dreams cross / The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.” The lines directly recall “The Hollow Men” as human life appears as what the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, following Plato, calls the Metaxy, that ineluctable state of tension-filled existence.12 In fact, a short while later in this poem, Eliot writes: “This is the place of tension between dying and birth / The place of solitude where three dreams cross.” The echo of “The Hollow Men” is even greater here, and these verses also anticipate in The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) the discussion of healthy and productive political and social tension, a result of harmony between oppositions (rather than unity that eliminates difference).¹³

The speaker here, so different from earlier in Ash-Wednesday, says, after uttering “Bless me father,” “though I do not wish to wish these things[.]” What that wish is, appears to be manifest in the highly sensuous verses that record such rejoicings as the first poem renounced: here “the lost heart stiffens and rejoices,” and “the weak spirit quickens to rebel” in being attracted to the “lost” flowers. One may, indeed, not “wish these things,” but there they are, and the human heart rejoices in them, the heart that may be “lost” in the sense that it must always be attracted by and to the things of this world. Would that it were otherwise, but it isn’t, and what it is, can and should still be affirmed, as the quoted verses plainly do. What Eliot embraces and advances is not transcendence of the “lost” world, but an Incarnational approach to it, which means that the world is accepted for what it is, neither a sign of a better world nor an evil to be rejected, but instead a means—a mediation—by which you proceed toward another, better world. Eliot does not risk mocking with falsehood, in part because he never diminishes either the incompleteness of our present world or its deceptions—“the blind eye creates / The empty forms between the ivory gates.” The attractiveness remains: there is always the risk, which he remarked in his 1948 sermon at Cambridge, of being converted by “the world.” He affirms, even so, knowing very well that things of this world are “attended.”

Because he knows this, he can finish with verses remarkably clear and plain, although demanding of precision in apprehending them: “Sovegna vos.” Difficulty thus intersects with clarity and plainness, the latter “attended” by the former, which you approach in, through, and by means of the letter. The prayer is to “Blessed sister, holy mother.” Eliot actually invokes both God the Father and the Virgin, Mother of God and our sister. With the line “Teach us to care and not to care” we meet the temptation toward falsehood, with which he asks that we not be tempted. As well, he recalls the end of The Waste Land, but there hope was hope for the wrong thing; here, “peace” feels earned, God’s will fully accepted.

Eliot does much more here. The verses serve, in part, both to summarize and to emphasize points dramatized earlier. One of the most important of these is represented in the penultimate line, “Suffer me not to be separated.” As we saw, the speaker was, precisely, “separated” in II, with consequences that Ash-Wednesday explores. Now at poem’s end, the line surely refers to separation of body and spirit. The other strikingly important, as well as enigmatic, verse is “Teach us to care and not to care,” which repeats exactly a verse in the first poem, where it is followed, as in VI, by “Teach us to sit still.” But a big difference separates VI from I (a separation that Eliot works to overcome by just this repetition, representing difference mediated by similarity): in the first poem, the speaking voice subscribed to “falsehood,” which by the end no longer mocks him.

“Teach us to care and not to care” encapsulates the issues at stake in Ash-Wednesday. The first meaning likely to come to mind is that represented in the early dramatizations of the speaker, who is “dissembled.” In similar fashion, the line in question may be separated into caring and not-caring. Further, brought together, caring and not-caring can point—away from the literal meaning of the words themselves—to a Hegelian-like synthesis. But if we stay with the plain meanings of the words, “Teach us to care and not to care” means something different altogether: “and” is the “necessarye coniunction” that Eliot has been exploring and dramatizing throughout Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems. He literally means here the necessity of caring and not-caring at the same time, as one act, in other words—thus mirroring God and man being one in the Incarnation.

Notes

1T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).

2T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), ix.

3Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography, rev. and extended ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), 39–40, 218, 219, 223.

4See Lyndall Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1999), and my books T.S. Eliot and the Essay: From “The Sacred Wood” to “Four Quartets” (Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2010) and Reading T.S. Eliot: “Four Quartets” and the Journey toward Understanding (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

5T.S. Eliot, A Sermon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1948), 5.

6T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 347.

7See my Reading T.S. Eliot.

8Eliot, Selected Essays, 277.

9T.S. Eliot, “The ‘Pensées’ of Pascal,” Selected Essays, 408.

10T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).

11Eliot, Selected Essays, 408.

12For the Metaxy, see Eric Voegelin, for example, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952), passim.

13T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), passim.