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Ash-Wednesday “ Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” - T. S. Eliot
Possible Sources for Ash-Wednesday ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],“ The allusions do not seem to reinforce an otherwise approachable meaning but instead seem essential to the structure, not immediately perceivable, of the poem.” - James Longenbach
Eliot’s Poetic Theory: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull.  And God said Shall these bones live?… “ Agents of purgation”? Or Symbols of consuming sin?
At the first turning of the second stair I turned and saw below The same shape twisted on the banister Under the vapour in the fetid air Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears The deceitful face of hope and of despair. At the second turning of the second stair I left them twisting, turning below; There were no more faces and the stair was dark, Damp, jagged, like an old man’s mouth drivelling,  beyond repair, Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark. At the first turning of the third stair Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture  scene The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute. Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth  blown, Lilac and brown hair; Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the  mind over the third stair, Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair Climbing the third stair.
Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied End of the endless Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible Speech without word and Word of no speech Grace to the Mother For the Garden Where all love ends. Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain,  spirit of the garden, Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still Even among these rocks, Our peace in His will And even among these rocks Sister, mother And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea, Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.
Other Theories Applied to Ash-Wednesday ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]

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Ash wednesday

  • 1. Ash-Wednesday “ Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” - T. S. Eliot
  • 2.
  • 3.
  • 4. Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull. And God said Shall these bones live?… “ Agents of purgation”? Or Symbols of consuming sin?
  • 5. At the first turning of the second stair I turned and saw below The same shape twisted on the banister Under the vapour in the fetid air Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears The deceitful face of hope and of despair. At the second turning of the second stair I left them twisting, turning below; There were no more faces and the stair was dark, Damp, jagged, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair, Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark. At the first turning of the third stair Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute. Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair; Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair, Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair Climbing the third stair.
  • 6. Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied End of the endless Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible Speech without word and Word of no speech Grace to the Mother For the Garden Where all love ends. Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden, Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still Even among these rocks, Our peace in His will And even among these rocks Sister, mother And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea, Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.
  • 7.

Editor's Notes

  1. Published in 1930, three years after conversion to the Anglican Church (often considered his “conversion poem”) This assumption led to A-W being grossly oversimplified for many decades. You all know Eliot as the author of The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; A-W has probably received less critical attention than it deserves because it was written in the shadow of what everyone considers his masterpiece—the poem that could speak for his entire generation. QUOTE: Eliot is famous for his allusive practice, and he openly makes references to allusion as part of his poetics. Therefore, it is not surprising that Source Study casts its shadow over all the other criticism on the poem, and while it’s combined with other theoretical approaches, never really goes away.
  2. Cavalcanti (translated by both Rosetti and Pound) and supported by original title to Part I (also all aboard on unpublished draft) Not to mention his own life/ biography… Lady of the Grotto- vision of a virgin like Lady seen by her before she was made a saint Longenbach also asserts that when studying Eliot’s poetry, it’s ultimately more important to know WHY he alludes to a particular work, not just to notice that he does, which is what so many critics have done. Clement’s article on “All aboard” - cites I. A. Richards remembering it as one of Eliot’s favorite songs, Eliot was born in St. Louis etc. but then doesn’t connect it to meaning.
  3. 1st Bullet: the “prejudice” he wants us to abandon is to try to isolate something individual about a work, the things that are most unique. 2nd Bullet: “This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.” AFTER 3rd Bullet: many of the critics comment on how A-W takes an individual experience of conversion/penitence and makes it universal 4th Bullet: we will see that the “very varied” sources make analysis a challenge 5th Bullet: a few critics like to bring in biographical information, and even more like to use opinions put forth in his prose to analyze A-W (problematic) Athough I am also doing so right now…. 6th Bullet: like the historical sense points to, Eliot thinks it’s important the artist is always very conscious of what Dr. Brannen called the “eternal present” that art occupies thereby noticing the slight shifts as new art is created and added to the whole body. He is very interested in the idea that all art is connected.
  4. Early crit was a lot of Source study mixed with Structuralism and Formalism LEOPARDS: Two main readings (withing Struct/Form) as “agents of purgation” that consume the organs of worldly lust … or symbols of past sins that consumed the speaker, and that he is now recognizing as such in his first step of penitence (Sister Cleophas put this best when she explained that “realization of sin” is the first step of penitence followed by contrition and satisfaction). Martin’s main sources are Purgatorio and Catholic liturgy : he says penitent’s new life “requires death-- a death of mortification of all the faculties… of will, affection, and of intellect” (Martin 110), and explains that in “the Hebrew terminology of psychology these faculties are designated respectively by the heart, the liver, and the head” which are precisely the organs that Eliot’s white leopards had “fed to satiety” on (111). PURGATION Cleophas using same source ( Purgatorio ) interprets differently as “sins of thought, word, and deed” and in seeing them, recognizes his past evil. PENITENCE Wooten: Structure of the Mass- “trials and temptations” through which the penitent is purified (therefore PURGATION) Slattery: Dante’s Inferno- “symbols for an animalistic life” PENITENCE Rodgers: Dante- “ purgation of disordered love: lust, gluttony, and avarice” Lois Cuddy: Dante - leopard reps lust that consumed speaker, After a youth that was in constant battle with sensuality, as Part II signifies, there is little left except memories of degradation and pain” (172). In her interpretation, the speaker is degraded to bones, rather than willfully purging himself of fleshly desires. Cunningham and Peter: Lenten services and Mass - “All we need to know about the leopards is that they are ‘white’—an adjective no doubt suggesting purity as the white chrisom of baptism does” (200). Don’t give credence to any opposing argument, either dismiss it entirely like who cares that there’s three, or say that Dante’s beasts aren’t agents of purgation and are depicted as famished so they can’t be related. C and P blatantly ignore fact that Eliot doesn’t allude to texts through matching representations but lets multiple sources coalesce in his mind to form “new combinations”
  5. STAIR: main readings are as symbol of penitential journey/ascent and also conversion, turning away from past sins and ascending in humility Morrison - first article - Dante’s Arnaut Daniel and his reference to stair “is not a purgatorial experience at all; it is not the slow refining away of measured iniquities proceeding by clearly understood law. It is the far more obscure and surprising experience of conversion, of passing from the outer darkness of despair to the humility of belief” (275). CONVERSION Cleophas - Dante’s Purgatorio - “Dante has schematized the sins of Purgatory as aberrations of love. As such they fall into three divisions… love perverted, which includes pride, envy, and anger; love defective, which is sloth; and love excessive, which contains avarice, gluttony, and lust” (335). He’s already overcome the pride and recognized sin, second stair corresponds with sloth through images of “repulsive incompletion” and then tempted by pastoral/sexual scene in the window… PURGATION because he slowly overcomes these obstacles. Rodgers - Purgatorio - “strikingly reflects the ambivalent emotions of hope and suffering” in the ascent (104). Also recalls the three steps leading into Purgatory’s gate which parallel the three steps of penance (Cleophas explained these as “recognition of sin”, contrition and satisfaction). PURGATion Hargrove - Dante - arduousness of spiritual climb and overcoming temptation, but finally moves out of the dark stair into the garden in a move toward purity. PURGATION Bush - archetypal myth and Catholic tradition - Rather than a memory of the speaker’s own struggle, Bush sees the shape struggling with the devil of the stairs as Christ, because in the Catholic tradition, “during the Lenten season… Christ must fight the Devil” (207). He then interprets the feminine imagery in the window scene in a positive and fruitful light, saying that the “‘slotted window bellied like a fig’s fruit’… consists of three symbolic female images of the womb” (208). The female figure he sees in the distance is blocked by a hawthorn blossom, which has connotations of “bad luck, and thus a time of suffering” (208) must come between him and the female figure that represents both Beatrice and the Virgin Mary—a figure of intercession and salvation. He nicely cites sources for the symbolism involving the hawthorn tree, and notes also Christ’s crown of thorns to really drive home the image of suffering and resurrection through death of the earthly self. The fact that he interprets the pastoral scene as what “awaits him” at his “redemption” (209) is an enormous deviation from what every other critic has said—they all seem to believe that the pastoral scene is an earthly distraction that attempts to steer the speaker away from his goal of spiritual ascent. Murphy -though Eliot openly criticized French prose poetry of the nineties, he yet found inspiration in Regnier’s “L’Escalier ,” which was produced in that tradition. She claims that the details of these poems line up much closer than with any other source, at least until the speaker nears the top of the ascent. Here, the disparities are instructive: while Regnier’s speaker is refused by a lady and plunged into despair, Eliot has replaced the lady (and the aspiration to romantic love) with a divine person, which will accept him even if he is unworthy. By noting this source, we can view this scene from a new angle if we understand that Eliot has “replaced carnal love with spiritual love” in order to avoid the “possibility of refusal” (182). I think this article is interesting because, now, looking at his ascent, we can choose to see it as an admirable goal, or as an admittance of defeat in human love and a search for consolation in the divine.
  6. LADY: Beatrice, Virgin, Christ-figure Martin: Dante - Dante finds Beatrice in heaven “transformed and glorified,” and she becomes “Judge, Intercessor, Saviour, and Lover all in one” (109). In other words, Martin claims that Beatrice—and by association, the lady in “Ash- Wednesday”—can and should be read as a symbolic representation of Jesus Christ. Slattery: described in paradoxes, and associated with Rose and Garden (149). Lady in Part VI… compares to Dante’s Beatrice, now “closely identified with the Virgin she ‘honours… in meditation’” (152). Rodgers: Dante - “several ladies who move through the poem echo the theme of Beatrice as intercessor” and “Like Beatrice, she symbolizes both divine love and divine wisdom.” (103) “All opposites will be reconciled in her” as she is a “ figura of the Virgin”or figure of” transcendence” from human to divine love (106). Bush: archetypal myth and Catholic tradition - claims that each of the individual ladies represent a stage in the speaker’s journey that ultimately coalesces into a sort of trinity that the “Blessed sister” encompasses—“the holy mother,” or the vision of the Virgin Mary, the “spirit of the fountain,” or Beatrice, and the “spirit of the garden,” or Matilda—when all these images come together in the garden, and it is in this garden that he calls on the “female trinity to intercede for him with the male, dominant Holy Trinity” (214). Eiles - only critic to refer to the Lady as a female Christ figure since Martin. Sees Lady’s embodiment of paradoxes as “result of her Christ-like nature” (126).