The Letter, the Body, and the Spirit: Animula and Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems
Abstract: The first (of two) verse paragraphs of Animula (1930) is an impersonal essay, ending with the statement that living begins after the viaticum (the sacrament given to the dying). Accordingly, the second paragraph, differently, is directed, in prayer, toward others. It treats the “simple” soul, the “growing” soul, and again the “simple” soul now misshapen and reduced by time and unable to “fare forward.” In time, the soul turns away from the world, separated from God and in Hell. Just such separation, including of body and spirit and of simplicity and difficulty, Ash-Wednesday confronts. Its six poems ultimately emerge as united in and by their difference, the Light shining “in darkness.”
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian. New York. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137444462.0007.
I Viaticum: “Living first in the silence” afterwards
A Song for Simeon may be a dramatic monologue, but Animula, published on October 9, 1929, the poet’s last book before Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, is unusual among Eliot’s Ariel poems in being an essay, indeed a familiar essay shorn of the personal. As an essay in verse, it anticipates the longer, much more complex, and greater essay-poem Four Quartets. As an impersonal essay, Animula perhaps calls to mind such prose pieces as “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
Animula is impersonal until we reach its second, and last, verse paragraph, which consists solely of a series of requests: they all begin, “Pray. . . . ”1 But there is no clear speaker praying “himself,” nor is there indication of an intercessor—like the Blessed Virgin—being invoked to do so on humankind’s behalf. The paragraph ends with this verse: “Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.” Animula thus recalls and returns us to the matter treated in its predecessors Journey of the Magi and A Song for Simeon: our birth begins our journey to death, a biological fact that Eliot has been probing theologically in the Ariel poems.
A major, if not fundamental and nearly overwhelming, question concerns just the turn I have noted from the very long first verse paragraph to the second. A resonant and powerful suggestion lies in the last verse of the opening paragraph: “Living first in the silence after the viaticum.” The viaticum is the sacrament of communion given to the dying, his or her last sacrament, in fact. The term is from the Latin, meaning “way,” and also refers to money or other provisions made for a journey, as well as to the bonus money sometimes paid to Roman soldiers or sailors. “Viaticum” thus signifies preparation and sustenance made for a journey.
We immediately notice the by-now-familiar collocation of living and death, treated in other Ariel poems and in Ash-Wednesday, in the latter of which, as we have also seen, silence figures prominently. Here in Animula, “Living” comes first in the line, “viaticum” at the end, the no doubt natural order of things. But Eliot writes that living begins in that silence after the viaticum. This part of the Last Rites consists of an act involving both the letter of the Word, spoken by the priest, and the Eucharist as the embodiment of the Word, given to the dying. The Word, then, spoken and silent, gives life to the spirit at the intersection of death with life. The suggestion seems inescapable: the spirit begins to live at this point, not earlier. In other words, thanks to the mediation and intercession of the priest, communion, and the Word, the spirit is released: in the sense both of being sent on its “way” and coming to live. Before that point, it has been held captive. It is not, though, set free from a body thus “dissembled” or now merely transcended; instead, the person is purified, his or her full and total being transformed and transfigured. This is structurally parallel to what Eliot describes in “Little Gidding” as the “expanding / Of Love beyond desire.”2 In a sense, the body has come “inside” the spirit, or soul, and in this way begins, at last and first, to live.
And this “act” itself parallels what Eliot describes in Ash-Wednesday as a redeemed writing, which “restor[es] / With a new verse the ancient rhyme.” The soul, Animula says and repeats, “comes from God.” Death “restores” it, then, in a new form, wherein the soul is embodied and at the same time purified and released from its earthly body. The spirit is born with the Word at death and (thus) “restored” to God, in a new form that (yet) is the old “rhyme”; it is, essentially new in assuming a new form.
The poem then enacts the points made syntactically and grammatically by literalizing and materializing them: a blank space simulates the silence that comes after the viaticum, and the following verse paragraph, with its marked differences in tone and texture as well as voice, represents the change to “living.” The urge to pray signals a new body, as it were, for the soul; it is no longer “Irresolute and selfish,” nor “lame” and “Unable to move forward or retreat.” It is now other-directed, its concerns for diverse and various strangers: Guiterriez, Boudin, Floret, “For this one who made a great fortune, / For that who”—pointedly—“went his own way.”
The last verse apparently refers to our familiarly understood birth, rather than that following the viaticum: “Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.” The “us” here, perhaps suggesting that the newly born spirit requires prayer (although one always is in need) points to the changing soul’s communion with, rather than separation from, universal and common humanity.
Animula repeats, that is, mirrors, the described action, the verses, with their “ancient rhyme,” that is, the Incarnational pattern of “and-ing” and “impossible union” (which is what “rhyme” means) assuming the form of the essay. Thereby, this Ariel poem prepares the way for Four Quartets.
Like Journey of the Magi, Animula opens with an unidentified quotation, consisting of but one verse: “ ‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul.’ ” As is well established, the line derives from Dante’s Purgatorio (16:85–88), which Eliot cites in his Dante,3 written while he was working on these poems and also includes in his essay on Sir John Davies (1926). The unusual grammatical inversion of the sentence, entirely Eliot’s, signals that the poet is freely adapting and modifying the borrowed words for his own artistic purposes. In fact, the quotation opening Animula raises the question, as do the other Ariel poems we have considered, of use. It does still more, for, coming from outside the observing voice that speaks the poem, belonging to an-other and acknowledged as such, it anticipates the poem’s later turn outward, with prayer for others.
The paragraph that includes and follows the quotation is made of four long sentences, and treats, in chronological order, the “simple,” the “growing,” and the “simple” soul again, this time said to derive from “the hands of time.” In the first treatment, the soul, deriving from “the hand of God” (in Dante’s formulation) arrives—having come this “way”—at “a flat world” full of movement and action, poetically rendered by the tumbling proliferation of gerunds, including “changing,” “Moving,” “Rising or falling,” “grasping,” “Advancing,” “retreating.” These acts do not so much accumulate—certainly they are not amalgamated—as exist as different versions of the same unsuccessful effort, linked by “or” instead of “and.” This world being “flat,” nothing makes much difference, the soul indiscriminately “taking pleasure / In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,” “in the wind, the sunlight and the sea,” “the sunlit pattern on the floor / And running stags around a silver tray,” content, indeed, with “playing-cards and kings and queens, / What the fairies do and what the servants say.” As a result of not distinguishing, the soul “Confounds the actual and the fanciful.”
The “growing soul,” on the other hand, bears a “heavy burden,” which “Perplexes and offends more, day by day; / Week by week, offends and perplexes more.” Daily perplexing and offending turns into weekly offending and perplexing. This results from the “imperatives of ‘is and seems’ / And may and may not, desire and control.” Distinctions are at once made, required, and imposed. The further consequence is that the growing soul finds itself essentially vegetating amidst the “pain of living” and the “drug of dreams.” And so, paradoxically, “and” replaces “or,” the soul not really choosing, or perhaps being able to choose, though it increasingly exists in a world of distinctions. The soul, now, is no longer described as growing but again as “small,” relegated to no more knowledge, and less understanding, than that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The final sentence of the paragraph begins with a variation of the opening quotation, requiring the reader’s distinguishing: “Issues from the hand of time the simple soul.” Time shrinks the soul, reducing it, rendering it “lame,” but also “selfish” as well as impotent. It is more pathetic than, while reminiscent of, Prufrock and the “hollow men,” unable to move in any direction, let alone “fare forward,” indeed fearful of “the warm reality,” even of “the offered good.” It cannot but deny “the importunity of the blood,” a thing like the voice we hear in the first poem of Ash-Wednesday and like the pictured result of the denial and loss of the senses in “Gerontion.” So fearful, incapacitated, and separated from the senses, the body, and the physical world is it that the “small soul” is a “Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom.” More than the situation detailed in “The Hollow Men,” where “the Shadow” is said “to fall between,”4 in Animula, the shadow has come within, eating away the “small soul.” As the body goes, so goes the spirit.
It is thus misleading, reductive, and but half-truth to conclude, as B.C. Southam does in his often trenchant and helpful discussion, that Eliot embraces and advocates “the idea of living on, spiritually, after the last sacrament” (italics added).5 To be sure, the etymology of viaticum suggests the making or having of provisions for a journey, and the journey Eliot has in mind is not the familiar, merely physical one taken by the Magi, for example. But to say that Eliot is proposing (simply) a “spiritual” afterlife misses the point of the poem and of his whole understanding of the Incarnation manifested in the poems following his conversion. The spirit is not to be separated from the body, the body from the spirit—nor the spirit from the letter.
Let us return another, last time to the final section of the long first verse paragraph and take a look at the lines together. Again, we begin with the significant change to the paragraph’s opening, retaining the grammatical inversion that places emphasis, indeed precedence, on the action, secondarily on the actor (circumscribed inside the prepositional phrase), and only in tertiary fashion, on the subject. The idea is thereby enforced of the soul as malleable, moreover a product of outside forces. “Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,” the “simple soul” is “Unable to fare forward or retreat,” in that regard resembling Prufrock. “Fare forward” becomes, in Four Quartets, Eliot’s insistent—and urgent—message to us all: not “fare well,” but fare forward, ever-moving, despite the early speaker in Ash-Wednesday, who, in not faring forward, commits himself to the ineffectual, unnecessary, and false “way” of asceticism, believing that he needs nothing from outside himself to craft his soul, rather constructing it all himself and on his own. Animula furthermore describes reality as “warm,” at least some offerings in fact as “good.” But the “simple soul” now turns away, “Denying the importunity of the blood,” and ending up like that speaker in Ash-Wednesday (but unlike the escaping transcendentalist Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who precisely does engage in the “retreat” brilliantly figured in the famous sermon he is forced to endure in the long, central third chapter).6 In Animula, the soul that has come from God is misused and abused by time (just as Wordsworth said in the Intimations Ode); rather than growth and enrichment has come (only) reduction, the soul narrowed, misshapen, in effect made the virtual opposite of what it might have been, could have been, and should have been. This is that inverse of outward progression that Alexander Pope details in the fourth book of The Dunciad, where all ends “in Self.”7 Far from time bringing wisdom as we popularly assume and often declare, it brings return and reduction. The only wisdom, Eliot says in Four Quartets, is “the wisdom of humility,” seen lacking, of course, in the “simple soul” here. The interpreter is free to suggest that the picture finally emerging of the “simple soul” is nothing other than that of Hell, one definition of which is separation from God.
The (literal) rhymes in the passage I have just quoted are barely noticed, but they are present, even if but half and slant: blood, good, gloom, room, viaticum. The last word literally extends, its rhyming occurring only in the fourth syllable. The linking of good and gloom feels strange, as does blood and room, thus four syllables not all rhyming with each other but bearing a hint of just that capacity. Rhymes are thus present, but variously imperfect. They stand in need, we may further say, of help—“support,” says “Little Gidding”—from one another.
One thing more, at least: the “growing soul” evidently has little or no awareness of what appears before its own eyes, no more or less than does the “simple soul” become “misshapen,” as well as “lame” and “selfish.” It denies when it should accept, fearing “the reality” that is “warm” with life and promise rather than “faring forward” beyond desire to love. It sees not the way.
The way is, though, apparent in the poem, in, that is, the pattern that the forward motion of the words embodies: in, for example, the play of “or” and “and” and the meaning and significance revealed in, through, and by means of “squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess.”
Including the Word, “the offered good” that is “within / And for the world,” “with a full juice of meaning” suggested in the warmth of “the reality,” effectively the polar opposite of the coldness of Hell that the “simple soul” incarnates, left to its own devices, unaccepting, unresponsive.
Ash-Wednesday is—and I have hinted at it, at least—a very physical body, full of twists and turns, “things” walking, eagles soaring, body separated and “dissembled,” parts lying about, in need of collecting and restoration. Breathing—that animus—is hard in the first poem, where “there is nothing.” And yet, there, “trees flower, and springs flow.”8 It is man who “cannot drink.” If “wings” there be, the sort by means of which Stephen Dedalus would “fly by the nets” held out to trap him, they are “merely vans to beat the air / The air which is now thoroughly small and dry.” It is, in fact, “Smaller and drier than the will,” contracted, shriveled, no more vibrant than those “dissembled” body parts on which “three white leopards” feasted—precisely at the time of (human) fasting.
In the sixth poem, things are different, healthier. Instead of a confronting either/or, there is tension: life recognized as “the time of tension between dying and birth” (italics added, hinting at the “living” that begins “with the silence after the viaticum”). Senses are present and functioning: sight, sound, smell, especially smell, which alone is said to “renew . . . the salt savour of the sandy earth.” The earth is, here, warm with taste that (also) preserves.
When the speaker prays, in the penultimate verse of Ash-Wednesday, “Suffer me not to be separated,” the reader cannot but think of the separation of the body that the second poem has represented. The reader must surely think, as well, of the separation of the body from the spirit that the first speaker in the poem embraces and advances. Then of course, given Ash-Wednesday, there is both the separation from sin that is to be pursued (even as “Little Gidding” affirms, “Sin is Behovely”) and separation from God that defines Hell.
Whether finally or not, there is also the second poem’s ending verse paragraph, which treats separation, as well as “division” and “unity.” The words deserve our attention here: “Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining.” What they said, perhaps surprisingly, is, “We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other”—no “support” there. That the bones are happy to be scattered is hardly an endorsement of separation; if they “did little good to each other,” it is because of the implied separation from the rest of the body. Now they embody an overcoming of (that) separateness, being “united,” forgetting both “each other” and “themselves,” perhaps thus caring and not-caring.
With the last two-and-a-half verses, enigma returns: “This is the land which ye / Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity / Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.” The allusion in these verses is to Ezekiel 48:9, as well as 37:15–22: God speaks to the prophet, declaring the division of the land by and for the tribes of Israel and instructing Ezekiel to unite the tribes of Joseph and Judah, which are at the time divided. As always, Eliot uses the Biblical references for his own poetic purposes and end.
One of the first things you note about these verses, attending to verbal details, is the fact of that archaic and trite little word “ye.” All it may do, though, is reinforce the evident difference in speaker in the last two-and-a-half verses from the earliest, which is the voices of the bones. In between is a third voice, which refers to those bones in the third-person. All three “persons” are thus engaged in these seven lines, though the end to which this is done remains elusive.
The second most noticeable thing is likely the statement that “neither division nor unity / Matters.” Everything we have read in Ash-Wednesday, before and after this passage, concerns the material difference between “division” and “unity,” ostensibly binary oppositions. But then—put this way, the statement appears in a new light: neither of them does matter, not just because they are, like all differences, in fact related but also because there is the primary, fundamental fact that their “inheritance” trumps both options, in fact “united” in and by their very difference. Here too, then, there is no inherent contradiction but, rather, another instance of the prevailing Incarnational pattern, which is of “impossible union,” as Four Quartets explores it.
The Word is—literally—the body: God incarnate, that is, embodied. Eliot signals the relation of res et verba when, in Ash-Wednesday, he uses the same word—“lost”—to describe words and the heart, the lilac, and the “sea voices.” The Word is also the physical, material acts and actions of the Blessed Virgin, Who, whether She Herself “walks,” sets things to walking (like “the years”), and functions “between” the “yews.” She thus participates in our essential pattern and structure, we who walk, often torn, caught as human beings in an “in-between” condition, a condition of inescapable, ineluctable complexity, difficulty, and fierce and unrelenting struggle—“among the rocks,” on the twisting and turning stair, confronted by the Devil.
Squeezing and squeezing words actually has the paradoxical effect not of reducing—or dissembling—them but of both relating them to one another and materializing them. Words such as that tiny “ye,” as well as the more substantial-appearing “division” and “unity,” acquire a virtually physical presence. This is a consequence not merely of making a material difference in perception and cognition but also by acquiring weight and heft.
Disembodied—and dissembled—ideas, apart from the words of which they are made, feel less weighty, even flighty (Swift connects them with “enthusiasm” and air, including those vapors that rise from a person’s lower parts to, he says, the brain).9 They thus are both less noticeable, less connected to and rooted in the senses, and palpably less exact than words. Ideas float above (like the whorish island Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels) in a manner that words never mirror. Words, differently, have the capacity to be precise, though, as Eliot says, they do not stay still; they have texture, they occupy a definite and specific space for a while, but they also slip and slide like the human body; like it, they decay. Their mobility, and a certain restlessness, further links them with the body. Words matter so much because they are matter, having the capacity to hurt you deeply and badly. They bite, sock us; they often leave us with a bad taste; you feel their sting, as you also do their enormous power to soothe. At least since the “dissociation of sensibility” (that Eliot claims, set in during the seventeenth century), we do not normally feel ideas.10
Ideas derive from within us; they are born with us. Words precede us; we are born into them.
Words, written and oral alike, seek response; ideas do not, floating inert, ready to be taken up and used. Words are, of course, used, too, but they ask not to be merely used. When in Ash-Wednesday, the “Lady of silences,” signs but speaks no word, She thereby utters the Word, and It draws a response from the fountain, which “sprang up,” and from the bird, which “sang down.”11
Response is all, or nearly all. The Blessed Virgin responded to God, conceiving thereby the Infant. “Gerontion” had said, while emphasizing through the titular speaker the vital loss of all the senses, that they had been “used for thy closer contact,” meaning that the senses are a means of approaching God—but only as response to His initiation, “thy” contact. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that the fifth poem of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems focuses first on the Word and then on a poet’s lyrical response to the Word. These two verse paragraphs, joined (though separated) by words taken directly from Micah 6:3 (“O my people, what have I done unto thee,” an obviously rhetorical question), consist of nine verses each, and together, represent the poems’ most sustained, direct, and important comparison and analysis of the word’s relation to the Word.
We begin our (final) consideration with reference to Lancelot Andrewes, whose exegeses stand behind Eliot’s formulations regarding the Word, which can at first blush seem mere verbalism, word-play of a pedantic sort. In a recent book, Nicholas Lossky has spelled out the importance and the implications of Bishop Andrewes’s representation of the response I have been discussing while setting the stage for our consideration of the squeezing and squeezing of words that both Andrewes and Eliot practice: there is, he writes in his magisterial study,
the risk of remaining in the realm of concepts and eluding the physical reality implied by the conception. Andrewes invites his hearers to come face to face with this reality. He commences this subject by recalling that in the virginal conception it was not a matter of an act uniquely divine, where humanity would be passively receptive; humanity participates actively, in the person of the Virgin, by making a gift of the flesh to Christ. (Italics added)12
Facing the reality is crucial, according to both “The Hollow Men” and Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems.
Fr. Lossky then quotes the following apt passage from Bishop Andrewes’s ninth Nativity sermon (on the Incarnation):
This we are to hold; to conceive is more than to receive. It is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also. A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The Blessed Virgin is, and therefore is because she did. She did both give and take. Give of her own substance whereof His body was framed; and take or receive power from the Holy Ghost, whereby was supplied the office and the efficacy of the masculine seed. This is concipiet. (Last italics in the original)13
Now we return to Eliot’s indebted words regarding the Word, which make clear Its relation to them and both of them to “the world.” The verbal play is palpable, but precise and possessing “a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess.” To a significant degree, this passage by now should need no elucidating; it is clear enough, as long as the reader attends carefully, takes his or her time, is willing to sit still among the rocks that are the words. I have offered analysis of the passage earlier in this book and do not wish to repeat myself here. Suffice it to say, among a couple of other things, that the last words here cement the Virgin’s connection with the Word, the “silent sister” and “Lady of silences”: “And the light shone in darkness and / Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled / About the centre of the silent Word.” Further, there can be no doubt of the Word’s engagement in and with the physical and material world of humankind; being God incarnate, the Word is not outside that familiar, ordinary, and mundane world.
Moreover, the Word needs not words to accomplish Its ends and purposes. It is, in fact, known in and by means of Its silence. Eliot’s words may seem to undercut his words. Does he perhaps mean only that the Word exists and can perform Its functions and achieve Its ends in the absence of words? That is clearly not the case, for the matter is framed by—and is responsive to—the condition set off by the “If” that opens the verse paragraph. Even if, that is, the word is not or cannot be heard, both “lost” and “spent,” even “unspoken,” the Word is nevertheless present and active, active “without a word.” The Blessed Virgin incarnates this activity—in the world and for the world.
The second verse paragraph of this poem, consisting like the first of nine lines, clearly asks to be compared with that preceding passage. The passage comes as a response to the former, this done by a lyric poet, rather than a theologian or theologically oriented speaker. These verses represent the word in the world, now, here. They are juvenile, sophomoric, the rhyming deliberately and pointedly askew, occurring not at line’s end but within the line, and the diction bland and trite: this amounts to noise and little more. How can the Word be heard in and amidst this blather? If we are tempted to suppose that the occasional internal rhyming is meant to suggest that larger-sense rhyming that occurs within the world, thanks to the Incarnation, we may respond that, so granted, the whole passage fails to rise to the level of responsible poetry, certainly not capable of “Redeem[ing] / The unread vision in the higher dream / While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.” Of course, these internal rhymes may be intended to represent the poetaster’s pathetic efforts, which are not at all to be condemned but to be recognized as an incomplete effort. If the poet’s responsibility now, here, lies in “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme,” he or she has failed in and with these verses. Exegesis can offer very little help, the words lacking that “full juice of meaning” with which they might be filled and charged; instead of working as Incarnational objects, through which the Word speaks, they are empty tokens, mere ciphers, carelessly “ordered,” “lame,” and inert, with little if any capacity to move, to walk. On the other hand, perhaps the Word does speak, even here.
In any case, some readers call this passage good. But no “light” shines through as in the preceding verse paragraph, no capacity to “walk” with the reader. We are left to “walk among noise,” accentuated, by the way, with the lack of full stops (as distinguished from the first verse paragraph), and with that noise and the lack of “silence,” it is little wonder that we so routinely “deny the voice.”
Whereas the first, theological passage asks the reader to squeeze the words as the writer has done in putting them on paper, the second may lure the reader by means of its simplicity and straightforwardness, but it ultimately says little, paradoxically and ironically floating untethered in a miasma of (imprecise) words, the province of the spirit that killeth. Joining the two passages, one precise and effective despite first appearance, the second vague (and spiritual), Eliot asks his reader to “Be mindful.” He also fares forward, looking toward Four Quartets, whose lyrical fourth sections also fail to achieve the precision and responsible expression needed to be clear concerning challenging and difficult matters. What Four Quartets achieves, perhaps uniquely, is the “impossible union” of poetry and theological philosophy, of poem and essay, that Eliot here essayed in Ash-Wednesday. He, of course, manages to make poetry out of that philosophy to a far greater and more extensive and revealing degree than even these nine verses hint at. He refuses to separate.
1 T.S. Eliot, Animula (London: Faber and Faber, 1929).
2 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
3 T.S. Eliot, Dante (London: Faber and Faber, 1929).
4 T.S. Eliot, Poems 1909–1925 (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1925).
5 B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 6th edn (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, 1996), 244.
6 On Joyce’s novel, see my Swift, Joyce, and the Flight from Home: Quests of Transcendence and the Sin of Separation (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2014).
7 Alexander Pope, Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston, MA: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1969), line 480.
8 T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (New York: Putnam, 1930).
9 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, “Gulliver’s Travels” and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1960).
10 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 281–91.
11 One should not, incidentally, be thrown off track by the gnat’s wing of the Virgin’s being described as “spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden” (italics added). Once more, Eliot is calling on us to “be mindful.” While resembling us, Mary is not us, just as the “Lady of silences” is different from, and on another level from, the “Lady” of the second poem here. Nor is the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, Third Person of the Trinity, to be understood as like the human soul.
12 Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England, trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 48.
13 Quoted, ibid. (from Nativity Sermon 9).