Another Ash Wednesday will soon be upon us, marking the beginning of another Lent. The pace and predictability of the liturgical year—like the academic year—seem both quicker and more comfortable as the years go by. I have been a Catholic and an English professor for 32 years; I cannot dissociate my academic life from my faith life, for each has always informed the other.   

I entered the church on Shrove Tuesday in 1993 at the Georgia State University Catholic Chapel, and the following day I excitedly went to a noon Ash Wednesday liturgy at Sacred Heart downtown. I expected solemnity and quiet. What I witnessed instead was a horde of people, many of them not Catholic, who lined up to be told that they were dust, then literally smudged with it. As many of them walked out of the church, they were already wiping their faces, anticipating their return to the office. I confess I didn’t understand the point, and for years I struggled with this unique day in the church year. 

The speed with which pivotal days and seasons in the church revolve year after year, and the customs we associate with their celebration, can after a while become mundane. Religious practice that becomes mere habit quickly loses any sense of mystery. I learned a long time ago that if Ash Wednesday were ever going to mean anything to me beyond the textbook justification and a smudge on the forehead, I would have to add something to my practice of the day. 

So for all the Ash Wednesdays that I’ve puzzled and prayed over, I have supplemented my visit to church with a reading of T.S. Eliot’s great conversion poem “Ash Wednesday.” I don’t pretend to understand all of it, but I don’t think understanding is the point. Contemplation is often superior to comprehension. 

Eliot wrote the poem in 1927, when he finally decided to renounce what he called “the void.” Though he had always been curious about liturgical and sacramental Christianity, it took a 1926 visionary experience in Rome, before Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” to convince him to act. In 1927 he became both a British citizen and, in his words, an Anglo-Catholic. The poem was published in 1930 as a limited-edition small press book, and then later printed in larger quantities. Excerpts from the multiple parts of the poem were also published in magazines.   

‘Common to us all’ 

“Ash Wednesday” is a touchstone in the poetic and spiritual progress of a truly great modern poet. It is perhaps Eliot’s most famous “religious” poem, though the poet himself disliked the label. As he wrote to Reverend M.C. D’Arcy: “It states the progress of one person. If that progress is in the direction of ‘religion,’ I can’t help that; it is I suppose the only direction in which progress is possible.” Like all great art, “Ash Wednesday” transcends the personal to become truly universal. Eliot’s conversion, affliction and redemption are in many ways common to us all. 

The poem is in six numbered parts, each with a unique set of motifs or symbols concerning a particular spiritual theme. Though each part works as a singular poem, taken together they create a unified whole. Like the day that gives the poem its title, the work asks to be considered again and again, year after year. If you embark upon reading the poem this Lent, I suggest that you first read it in its entirety. Listen to it first, then read it silently and aloud to yourself. Then you can read it section by section, like a daily devotion. 

A man receives ashes in 2020 at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Smyrna. For all the Ash Wednesdays that columnist David King has puzzled and prayed over, he has supplemented visits to church with the reading of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Ash Wednesday.” Photo by Michael Alexander

Part I begins with the refrain “Because I do not hope to turn again/Because I do not hope/Because I do not hope to turn.” Eliot took the image from the 13th century Italian poet Cavalcanti, who wrote that he had no hope of returning to Tuscany. Eliot liked to borrow lines from classical literature and make them his own; in this case, the image is linked to the Ash Wednesday liturgy: “Turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel,” or “To dust you shall return.” The first part of the poem is a recognition of our fallible nature and our continual relapse into sin, yet it also represents a plea for mercy. The speaker cannot focus. His mind wanders from prayer to conscious and unconscious streams of disconnected thought. Eliot captures exactly the distracted feeling we often get in a church setting surrounded by people and images.  

At the first part’s end, however, the speaker pleads: “Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to be still.” The section concludes with an introduction of the Marian motif that will run throughout the poem, “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death/Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.” 

The Virgin Mary reappears immediately in Part II, which begins with a famous image of three white leopards feeding upon the speaker’s “legs, heart, liver, and hollow round of my skull.” Eliot sometimes joked that the leopards were his own brand of nonsense, but on more than one occasion he confided in clergy that the leopards were intended to represent “the world, the flesh, and the devil.”  With its multiple symbols, Part II is indeed difficult, yet it contains a litany of three-to-four-word lines that is almost mystical, imploring “Grace to the Mother/For the Garden/Where all love ends.” 

Part III contains a favorite Eliot image of the “turning stair,” which hearkens back to the motif of turning and returning. This is a poem of spiritual awareness, invitation, acceptance and discipline. In short, it becomes a plea for conversion and concludes with the familiar “Lord, I am not worthy/Lord, I am not worthy/but speak the word only.” 

Parts IV, V and VI are the longest; Eliot was most pleased with sections IV and V.  Part IV is clearly about Mary, for Eliot sees Mary as she should be understood, always a beacon that leads to Christ. The section alludes to the Salve Regina and implores “Sovegna vos,” from Dante’s “Purgatory,” which means “be mindful.” In this section, Eliot dares to summon further the mystical, and he recognizes the paradoxical power of silence: “The silent sister veiled in white and blue … whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word.”   

In this silence, the way is cleared for the beginning of Part V, which distinguishes between “the spent word” of the world, and “The Word without a word, the Word within/The world and for the world;/And the light shone in darkness.”   

Listen to how Eliot brings clarity out of chaos in this passage from part V: “Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled/About the center of the silent Word.” This is daring, marvelous poetry, the response to which Eliot gives a refrain and an image. The refrain is from Micah: “O my people, what have I done unto thee.” The image is of a nun, “a veiled sister,” praying for the whole world, uniting herself with God to simply “O my people.” 

Brilliantly, the poem concludes where it began, which is a favorite Eliot device. Part VI begins “Although I do not hope to turn again/Although I do not hope/Although I do not hope to turn.”  Eliot characterizes us as pitiful and frail: “Wavering between the profit and the loss,” life reduced in our poverty to simply “The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.” 

Were we and Eliot to stop there, the poem would be depressing and bleak, another 20th century nihilistic bleat. But Eliot isn’t dwelling in the ashes solely for the ashes’ sake. Eliot wants to recover, to reclaim. As “the lost heart stiffens and rejoices,” Eliot summons a chorus of land and sea, garden and rock. Imploring again for the grace to be still, the poet pleads for us all—“Our peace in His will”—and brings the poem to an end with a reference to the Anima Christi and Psalm 102, “Suffer me not to be separated/And let my cry come unto thee.” 

Throughout “Ash Wednesday,” Eliot succeeds in reflecting both the fragmentation of the modern world and mindset and the certainty of divine love and mercy. By juxtaposing our doubt with the fidelity of Mary, Eliot presents a believable scenario in which we are delivered out of affliction. And as always in Eliot, and his muses Dante and Dame Julian of Norwich, suffering precedes redemption. 

My notes on the poem are meant to help you with your own reading of “Ash Wednesday.” Should I write notes for the poem another time, they will be different. And your own reading of the poem could both clarify and amplify mine. For like all great literature, and the practice of our shared faith, “time is always time/And place is always and only place/And what is actual is actual only for one time/And only for one place.”   

Ash Wednesday is indeed a day for contrition and penance, but Eliot invites us to also see it as an opportunity to “rejoice that things are as they are/And pray to God to have mercy upon us.”