From Hopelessness to Hope: A Reflection on Ash Wednesday

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888.   He was raised in the Unitarian sect in which his grandfather, a member of the wealthy and elite Eliot family of New England, had been a minister.   After receiving a classical education in elite private academies as a boy he went on to study literature at Harvard and philosophy at the Sorbonne before winning a scholarship to Merton College in Oxford at the outbreak of the First World War.  Oxford failed to win a place in his heart, however, and he quickly relocated to London, where he was taken under the wing of fellow American ex-patriot Ezra Pound.

 

Ezra Loomis Pound had met Eliot when the latter was still a student at Oxford.  Conrad Aikin, whom Eliot had known at Harvard, had arranged for them to meet so that Eliot could show Pound, who had just married Dorothy Shakespear, his “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.   Pound was impressed, and the following year, on his recommendation, Harriet Monroe published the poem in Poetry.   It was Eliot’s first poem to be published outside of academe.    Pound and Eliot struck up an instant friendship and the former, whose reputation as a poet had already been established, would continue to help further Eliot’s literary career, most notably as editor of “The Waste Land”, published in Eliot’s own The Criterion in 1922.

 

There were a number of similarities between the two poets that undoubtedly strengthened and sealed their friendship in these early years.   Both had been born and raised in the United States and had fled across the Atlantic to the Old World.   Both had been steeped in the literature and philosophy of ancient and medieval civilization and had come, as a consequence, to reject the attitude of progressive optimism towards the future of Western civilization that was prevalent and ubiquitous in their formative years.   Their trans-oceanic flight can be seen as a symbolic representation of this rejection.  They preferred to live in what they saw as the decay and ruin of the older civilization in its last days – the “waste land” of Eliot’s poem – than in the epicentre of the optimistic liberalism that was ushering in a new barbarism.   Three years after the publication of “The Waste Land”, Eliot returned to this vision of Western Civilization as a ruined wasteland in “The Hollow Men”.   The first stanza of this poem depicts the inhabitants of the wasteland as stuffed strawmen, like the effigies burned on Guy Fawkes Day, who are beyond the envy even of those inhabiting the shadowy realms of death, through which Eliot takes his readers in Dantesque fashion in the four remaining stanzas, until they arrive on the beach of the “tumid river”  (presumably Styx), where the denizens of this dismal place dance around a “prickly pear” singing a dark parody of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” that concludes with “This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper”, undoubtedly the best known words of the poet except for those set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

 

It was shortly after the publication of “The Hollow Men” that Eliot took the step that would take him and Pound down different paths from their common beginnings.   The following year, on a trip to Rome, he fell to his knees in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta, much to the discomfort of his kin who were travelling with him.   This was out of aesthetic admiration but it signaled a spiritual awakening.    In 1927, to the horror of Virginia Woolf who declared him “dead to us all from this day forward”, he converted to orthodox Christianity, and was baptized into the Church of England (Unitarianism, as its name indicates, rejects the Trinity, and so this was an exception to the general rule of the Anglican Church accepting the validity of the baptism of other denominations) and confirmed the following day.   Later that year he became a citizen of the United Kingdom.   Having first rejected the false optimism of liberal progress which had made a wasteland out of Western civilization, he had now turned his back on the hopelessness and despair of his earlier poems by embracing the faith that liberalism had rejected.   Pound, the restless pagan, was for whatever reasons, unable lay anchor on such rock himself, and consequently found himself adrift in dangerous waters.

 

A couple of months after his baptism, T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” was published as part of the Ariel Poems, the first of his poems to be written from his new perspective of faith.   Three years later he would publish a much longer poem expressing the experience of his conversion.    He gave that poem the title “Ash Wednesday” from the day on which the penitential period of Lent begins.

 

The first of the poem’s six sections begins with a return to the sense of hopelessness from “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” in the words:

 

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn.

 

The final section begins by repeating these lines with the word “although” substituted for “because” and concludes with the prayer “And let my cry come unto thee” taken from the first line of the 102^nd Psalm.

 

From the opening expression of despair to the concluding expression of faith we have the poet’s journey from the former to the latter expressed in his own familiar manner of metaphor and allusion.    I have no intention of providing an extended commentary here, but the following is worthy of noting.

 

In the opening lines, which paraphrase the title line of Guido Cavalcanti’s “Per ch’io non spero” we can see Ezra Pound’s influence again.   Cavalcanti was a favourite of Pound’s.   Almost twenty years before “Ash Wednesday” was published, Pound had published a translation of the Florentine poet’s works.  In the period in which Eliot wrote and published “Ash Wednesday” Pound was working on the section of his Cantos that included his translation of Cavalcanti’s magnus opus “Donna me prega”, although this was not published until four years after “Ash Wednesday”.   “Per ch’io non spero” was written in the last year of Cavalcanti’s life, during his brief exile in Sarzana.   The line which Eliot borrowed had originally expressed Cavalcanti’s despair of ever seeing his native city again – Eliot changed the original’s “return” to “turn” to fit the context of his own poem – thus laying the foundation for the poem as a whole being charged with the task of going where he could not, back to his Lady, to speak to her as his messenger.

 

Eliot began the second section of his poem by addressing a Lady.   This very briefly creates the impression that he was continuing the allusion to Cavalcanti, but this impression quickly disappears as the Lady is spoken of by his bleached bones – he presents himself as having been eaten by leopards with God pronouncing over his bones the question from the Book of Ezekiel “shall these bones live” – in intercessory tones.   This would seem to suggest a reference to the Blessed Virgin – especially since the first section had ended with the petition “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death” from the Sancte Maria – except that it is stated of her that “She honours the Virgin in meditation” and thus must be somebody other than Mary.   There is no mystery, however, as to who this is, because it is clear that Eliot has switched allusions from Cavalcanti to his best friend – Dante Alighieri.  This is exactly the way Beatrice is depicted in Divina Commedia – as the faithful member of Mary’s retinue who sends Virgil to rescue Dante from the beasts at the beginning of the Inferno and guide him through hell and purgatory, before she takes over as his guide at the end of the Purgatorio and throughout the Paradiso.   Eliot’s previous long poems had been full of allusions to Dante.   Having passed through his own Inferno and Purgatorio in “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” he had finally arrived at his Paradiso in “Ash Wednesday”.

 

Perhaps there is also a message to his friend Ezra Pound implied here, a message to the effect that while the latter was still restlessly following his pagan star Cavalcanti, he had finally found peace in the faith of his Christian guide Dante.  

 

Today is Ash Wednesday on the liturgical calendar of Western Christianity and on this particular Ash Wednesday, more than ever before we need to follow T. S. Eliot on the path from “Because I do not hope” to “let my cry come unto thee”.   It has been almost a year since our rights, freedoms, and social lives were stolen from us by politicians, bureaucrats, and the medical profession who are clearly determined to keep these from us for as long as they possibly can, which, given the history of how long Communist oppression lasted in the Soviet Union, could be a very long time indeed.   We must not let this become grounds for hopelessness and despair for these involve the denial of faith that God is a gracious and merciful God Who hears our prayer.

 

It is customary on Ash Wednesday to begin a fast in which we give something up for the forty days (excluding Sundays) of Lent.  In recent years some of our ecclesiastical leaders have recommended that we consider “social media fasts” for this period.   As good of a suggestion as this would ordinarily be, it hardly seems advisable this year in which social media  is the only thing resembling contact, fake though it be, that the tyrannical and totalitarian politicians and doctors allow us to have with our friends and extended family.   Indeed, since so much has been forcibly taken from us over the last year, I would suggest that if we give anything up today, it be our voluntary acquiescence in the theft of our own and our neighbours’ rights, freedoms, and social lives.   If we were all to give up masks, social distancing, and all of these other stupid and idiotic rules and restrictions and regulations, that would be a start to bringing the light of hope back into this dark world.