Second Week of Lent 2025
On each week of Lent, Five Books for Catholics recommends a work for the season. Moreover, it aims to recommend different kinds of work: not just direct expositions of Christian doctrine, but also works of literature, music, and art that help us contemplate and enter the Lenten mysteries. This week it is literature’s turn.
Ash-Wednesday
by T.S. Eliot
Last week’s post was on St. Bernard’s Sermons for Lent and Easter. It was a follow-up on last December’s recommendation of his Sermons for Advent and Christmas. In like manner, we can follow up this Lent on Advent’s choice of literature with another work by the same author.
T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems were chosen during Advent. In addition to these Christmas poems, one of Eliot’s major poems, Ash-Wednesday, has a Lenten setting. Nor is it a minor work. The Scottish poet Edwin Muir regarded it as one Eliot’s most moving poems “and perhaps the most perfect.”
Eliot (1888-1865) started writing both his Ariel Poems and Ash-Wednesday around the time of his baptism into the Church of England. Not only do the two works reflect his conversion. They also mark a shift in his writing. Following his conversion, his major poems, such as Four Quartets (1936-1942) focus predominantly on Christian themes. So do some of his plays, such as Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1943).
Eliot published the collection Ash-Wednesday in 1930. However, he had already published its six poems separately in three parts between 1927 and 1929. This suggests that Ash-Wednesday is, like the Ariel Poems, a thematically linked series of poems. Indeed, Eliot occasionally spoke of it as such. On other occasions, however, he spoke of it as a single poem. His ambivalence suggests that it can be read in both ways.
Like most of Eliot’s poems, Ash-Wednesday is full of cryptic allusions and literary references. Indeed, it is one of his most difficult works. For this reason, it is worth reading in an edition with notes, such as The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I.
However, it would be a mistake to assume that each detail needs to be understood in full. Eliot claimed that even he did not understand the full reason for some of the poem’s images and allusions. Indeed, he objected to the view that a poem (and Ash-Wednesday specifically) is meant to be fully comprehensible. Instead, he argued, poetry is meant to make us experience things in their uniqueness and vitality.
Eliot was adamant that, despite its title, Ash-Wednesday is neither a religious nor a devotional poem. He made this clear in various letters written in 1930.
He demurred that Ash-Wednesday was no different from any of his earlier poems. As in his earlier verse, he was simply attempting to “to state a particular phase of the progress of one person:” stages of his own journey. It just so happened that now he was making the only authentic kind of progress. He was progressing toward religion. Ash-Wednesday is ‘religious’ in that sense, he acknowledged.
Eliot also refused to categorise Ash-Wednesday as devotional verse. In his view, only a spiritually advanced person, such as St. John of the Cross, could write devotional verse and use poetry as a medium to articulate mystical experience.
Rather, in Ash-Wednesday Eliot took himself to be delving into a theme that stood somewhere between devotional and conventional poetry but was heavily underexplored by modern poets: “the experience of man in search of God, and trying to explain to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal.”
However, Eliot did not rely exclusively on his own experience to do so. One of his many sources is inspirations is La vita Nuova, the collection of verse in which Dante critiqued and Christianised the medieval poetry of courtly love.
Eliot described Ash-Wednesday as “a first attempt at a sketchy application of the philosophy of the Vita Nuova to modern life.” In his Dante, he specifies that this is “the Catholic philosophy of disillusionment,” namely, the antiromantic disposition “not to expect more from life than it can give or more from human beings than they can give; to look to death for what life cannot give.” It is probably for its articulation of this philosophy that Eliot describes Dante’s Vita Nuova as “a work of capital importance for the discipline of the emotions.” It is not too difficult to see Eliot applying the Vita Nuova and its philosophy of disillusionment to both modern life and his own. The collection opens with the poet expressing his disaffection with “this man’s gift and that man’s scope” or “the infirm glory of the positive hour.” Furthermore, it is peppered with allusions to Dante and the dolce stil novo.
Less obvious is the work’s connection to Ash Wednesday. None of the poems is a straightforward description of the liturgy of the opening day of Lent. Rather the work’s title appears to be a reference to the Lent as a whole, which in turn represents the experience of new-found faith, conversion, penance, and the struggles of Christian life. Conversion brings with it an awareness that the things we prized previously are futile and transitory. This is how the work’s title ties in with “the Catholic philosophy of disillusionment.”
At any rate, one way to make sense of the work is to keep one eye on Dante and another on the liturgy of Lent.
Take the opening verse. It quotes the opening line of a ballad by Dante’s contemporary, Guido Cavalcanti (1250-1300): “Perch'i' no spero di tornar giammai” (Because I no longer hope to return). In Cavalcanti’s ballad, the poet, near death, bids farewell to both his lady and to life. Eliot takes up this line to speak of the convert’s disillusionment with prestige and careerism.
“Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things”
Here, Eliot is evoking not just Cavalcanti but Psalm 85:8 (KJV): “let them not turn again to folly.” Moreover, the threefold incantation of the verse is redolent of the penitential rite of the Mass: “Lord have mercy! Christ have mercy! Lord have mercy!”
There are various other allusions to Christian and Lenten penance. The division of the stairs in the third poem is taken from Dante’s Purgatorio. Other allusions are the colour violet of the fourth poem (the colour of liturgical vestments during Lent) and the penitent’s address to the confessor in the sixth poem. The fifth poem, on the other hand, intersperses Micah 6:3:“O my people, what have I done to thee.” That verse is the refrain in the Improperia of Good Friday.
Elsewhere, Ash-Wednesday describes the struggles and temptations of Christian life. For example, Eliot explained that the three leopards in the second poem represent the threefold concupiscence of the flesh, the world, and the devil. He may have been inspired by the three wild animals that Dante encounters at the beginning of the Divine Comedy. He may have inspired also by the symbolic representation of the threefold concupiscence in the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross.
However, Lent is a means, not an end. It looks forward toward Easter. Similarly, some of the many biblical references in Ash-Wednesday point toward the Paschal mystery. One example is the second poem’s reference to the Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones from which God works the resurrection of the dead (Ezekiel 37:1-11).
Moreover, the evocation of Dante’s Purgatorio in the third poem is countered and even resolved in the sixth’s closing citation of the famous verse uttered by Piccarda de Donati in the Paradiso: “Our peace in His will” (“E’n la sua volontade è nostra pace” III, 85).
Lent, like any conversion, consists in conforming oneself anew to God’s loving will. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday may impress more deeply upon our imagination and memory both the vicissitudes and consolations of the Christian struggle.
