In section 1, the speaker is set
to reject all worldly things. In the first two stanzas, he rejects the hope of
any fulfillment in worldly diversions, any potential for joy in existence, and
acknowledges that the “one veritable transitory power” is insubstantial, prone
to fading away into thin air.
The whole prayer in Part II introduces paradox as the
rhetorical form of the reborn subject, in recognition of the possibility of two
truths existing as one. The Rose in the garden symbolizes this state rather
well. It is, of course, a traditional symbol, but it helps to think of a real
rose as well as the Rose of literary convention. The Rose of literature often
symbolizes the perfection of an ideal love.
Part III of Ash-Wednesday
dramatizes the relinquishing of mastery in the figure of the spiral staircase
and the ascent of the subject toward a new life. Although the ascent is
spiritual, the struggle on the staircase is primarily moral.
In Part IV he acknowledges that the ‘‘fiddles and the flutes’’ must be
borne away. The new regime brings restoration and redemption from pain and
despair. But it does not erase the pain. Indeed, in Part IV we are asked to be
mindful (‘‘Sovegna vos’’) of the hurt of one in Dante’s Purgatorio (Canto
XXVI), Arnaut Daniel, the Provencal troubadour.
Part V backs away slightly from the personal engagement of the
previous four parts to meditate on the status of the word of God, the Word in
short, in a world where it is ‘‘unspoken, unheard’’. That the Word is not
visibly potent in a secularist world may be a shame, but it is not fatal to the
Word itself. The presence of the Word is not harmed by the fact that most are
deaf to it. The poem acknowledges both the presence of God, even in his seeming
absence, and the Word as revelation of His presence.
The final part/part 6 poem returns us to the theme of
transformation and to the voice of the uncertain supplicant. But instead of the
causal relationship suggested by ‘‘Because I do not hope to turn again,’’ the
restatement makes a subtle shift in responsibility. ‘‘Although I do not hope to
turn again’’ moves from causality to concession. The subject is now better
placed to accept the work of grace. He is able to see from ‘‘the wide window’’
something of the beauty of the world and a new lyricism comes into the text,
‘‘white sails . . . seaward flying,’’ ‘‘Unbroken wings’’ instead of ‘‘merely
vans to beat the air’’ in Part I.
The note of hope modulates into a
quickening recovery from the despair with which the poem began. The prayer to
the ‘‘Blesse`d sister, holy mother’’ asks for help in avoiding the self-mockery
of falsehood and suffering of separation. The vision at the end is not
transcendental; it cannot be defined as the desire to escape from the world
into the pure bliss of the spirit. It was the Incarnation now put forward as
the real meaning of faith. We cannot escape our human fate, but we are
vouchsafed glimpses of holiness in the midst of the encompassing tragedy. This
is not a special trick of the eye, it is what we see as an integral part of the
reality we all share, if . . ., if we care to look. And the concrete reality
that Eliot faced in the 1930s was not an ideal abstraction invented to house
the new spiritual order. It was England and his life there in which the hidden
order of grace moved.
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