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Poem. British Poetry. Hardcover book published as a Second Impression May MCMXXX (1930) by Faber and Faber Ltd., 24 Russell Square, London WC1 and printed in Great Britain. (The First Impression was published in April MCMXXX). This is not a print-on-demand or facsimile copy. Ash Wednesday (sometimes Ash-Wednesday) is a long poem written by T. S. Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
48 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
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About the author
T.S. Eliot
1,085 books5,713 followersThomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 71 reviews
February 22, 2023
It's a collection of tears, fault lines, cracked moments, and broken souls: the poet presents himself as a mistaken inhabitant of the city bite, all of the ash, dust, and mold, a furious witness to the silence of men, a silent admirer of women with soft breasts, frozen in the expectation of a man who no longer appears, a photographer revealing the "sand smiles of ghosts" names.
February 14, 2024
Ash Wednesday, in various branches of the Christian faith, is a serious day of contemplation. I remember well the Ash Wednesday services at the Catholic church that I attended in Bethesda, Maryland, in my youth; the priest would mark a cross in ashes on the forehead of each member of the congregation, while intoning the words “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” And that spirit of stern reflection upon mortality is certainly at the heart of T.S. Eliot’s 1930 poem Ash Wednesday.
T.S. Eliot is, of course, known as one of the most important modernist authors of the early 20th century. And those who look to Eliot as a veritable high priest of High Modernism might think of his poem The Waste Land (1922) as something of an Ur-Text of the modernist literary movement with its claims that, in an otherwise meaningless universe, only high art – where all the pieces interlock in flawless perfection – could provide human beings with a sense of order and meaning.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the abyss. Once a Unitarian, Eliot converted to the Church of England in 1927 – the same year in which the Saint Louis-born author became a British subject. In a preface to his book For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1929), he famously identified his state of mind as being “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” This new spiritual awakening on Eliot’s part seems to inform works like the poem “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and the verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Like these works, Ash Wednesday shows Eliot taking on a commitment to the Christian faith – albeit in the same sort of at-once grim and resolute spirit that characterizes The Waste Land.
Ash Wednesday, dedicated to Eliot’s wife, starts off on a note of foreboding that will be familiar to readers of Eliot’s work:
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 toward such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign? (p. 9)
In this opening stanza, I enjoyed the subtle and restrained rhyme scheme, and thought that I heard a prefiguring of the world-weariness of the unnamed Magus who serves as persona of Eliot’s later “Journey of the Magi”; the Magus recalls the worldly pleasures of his earlier pagan life, but realizes grimly that, now that he has beheld the Christ Child and brought Him gifts, he is “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods”, and adds that “I should be glad of another death.” Similarly, the speaker of Ash Wednesday feels a fundamental dissatisfaction with life as it is, and realizes that he has permanently turned a corner.
Unsurprisingly, Ash Wednesday abounds in religious references, and in language and phraseology drawn directly from Christian liturgy, as when Eliot, in the first section of the poem, writes that he will “pray to God to have mercy upon us…/May the judgement not be too heavy upon us” and later adds, from the “Hail Mary”, the words “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death/Pray for us now and at the hour of our death” (p. 10). Here, one sees the Catholic elements in Eliot’s self-definition as an “Anglo-Catholic,” as the veneration of the Virgin Mary is an area of particular emphasis in the Catholic faith.
The second section of the poem begins with images of leopards feeding upon the speaker’s physical self, following with reflections that once that physical self is gone, “Because of the goodness of this Lady/And because of her loveliness, and because/She honours the Virgin in meditation,/We shine in brightness.” The imagery of a lady and leopards made me think of Flemish tapestries that I’ve seen in medieval castles across Western Europe.
The third section of Ash Wednesday involves images of turning on, and climbing, three stairs – a Trinitarian reference that also involves leaving one state behind and ascending toward another – and ends “beyond hope and despair”, with the speaker reciting “Lord, I am not worthy/Lord, I am not worthy/but speak the word only” (p. 15) – a reference to the Roman centurion in Chapter 8 of Saint Matthew’s Gospel who declared that he was not worthy for Jesus to enter his home, expressed his certainty that it would be enough for Jesus to speak a single word to heal the centurion’s servant, and was praised for his faith by Jesus.
Section IV of the poem criticizes people who are in the presence of grace, but who do not seem to realize or sense it -- people
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,
Talking of trivial things… (p. 16)
This part of the poem made me think of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), with its references to people treating the profound in a trivial manner – “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.”
The blue of Mary’s robe is evoked again – “blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,/Sovegna vos” (p. 16). The Italian means “be mindful,” and refers to a moment in Chapter 26 of Dante’s Purgatorio, when the Provençal poet Arnaud Daniel, expiating on the Seventh Terrace the sins of lust that he committed in his lifetime, asks Dante the Pilgrim to remember in good time Arnaud’s suffering in that place. Aside from providing a reference to one of Eliot’s own favourite writers (remember that Eliot once wrote that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third”), this reference may at once evoke the suffering of the souls in Purgatory and the self-conscious exile of any Christian soul in this fallen world.
And the theme of redemption is once again foregrounded, as the speaker calls for someone to “Redeem/The time. Redeem/The unread vision in the higher dream” (p. 16). Placing the word “Redeem” at the end of each of these non-end-stopped lines reminds the reader of the importance of redemption within the Christian tradition.
Section V of the poem seems to amount to an extended meditation on the beginning of Saint John’s Gospel, with its evocation of Jesus Christ as the living and immortal Word of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Eliot counterpoints the Word and the world:
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken Word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word. (p. 18)
The Word of God goes unlistened to, in the main, leaving “No place of grace for those who avoid the face/No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice” (p. 18). Against that backdrop of a faithless world comes Eliot’s invocation of Chapter 6 of the Book of Micah: “O my people, what have I done unto thee” (p. 19). In this passage, God is asking His people why they have abandoned Him; the connection to the other ideas being expressed by Eliot seems clear here.
Stanza VI returns to ideas and images of Section I – “Although I do not hope to turn again/Although I do not hope/Although I do not hope to turn”, and evokes his sense of the Christian’s sense of exile in a fallen world of getting and spending: “Wavering between the profit and the loss/In this brief transit where the dreams cross/The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying (Bless me father)” (p. 20). Note how Eliot closes these evocations of life as a transitory, dreamlike state with a parenthetical reference to the ritual of confession.
Against “the time of tension between dying and birth/The place of solitude where three dreams cross” (p.20), Eliot concludes with a call for speaker and listeners alike to listen to, and submit to, the Christian message:
Blessèd 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. (p. 21)
“Suffer me not to be separated” is taken from the Anima Christi (“Soul of Christ”), a medieval prayer to Jesus. “And let my cry come unto thee” comes from Psalm 102 – the work of King David, another man who questioned his earlier life of secular prominence and sought spiritual redemption. Readers who enjoy delving into the wealth of allusions that characteristically marks Eliot’s work will find plenty of just that sort of thing.
The edition of Ash Wednesday that I read was an original 1930 printing of the poem, published by Faber & Faber, London. It came to me as an Interlibrary Loan delivery from the University of Memphis, and is marked “Handle With Care” (I have heeded that admonition). The date stamped on the first page is June 8, 1955 – presumably the date on which the university that was then called Memphis State University acquired this copy of the book. Yet the provenance of the book goes back even further, as the name “K. Davey – 1931” is written in script on that first page, right below where some Memphis State librarian marked the book as MSU property back in 1955.
It made me wonder: how many hands has this book passed through – from K. Davey in 1931, through a Memphis State University librarian in 1955, through how many other readers, to me reading Eliot’s ideas on a screened-in back porch overlooking some woodlands in Manassas, Virginia, in the decade of the 2020's? And did they read Eliot’s words in a spirit of shared faith commitment, or in a more skeptical frame of mind? Whatever the different answers to those questions might be, I found Ash Wednesday to be a fascinating look inside the ever-changing, ever-evolving ideas of a great author, set forth with T.S. Eliot’s characteristic mix of rigour and grace.
T.S. Eliot is, of course, known as one of the most important modernist authors of the early 20th century. And those who look to Eliot as a veritable high priest of High Modernism might think of his poem The Waste Land (1922) as something of an Ur-Text of the modernist literary movement with its claims that, in an otherwise meaningless universe, only high art – where all the pieces interlock in flawless perfection – could provide human beings with a sense of order and meaning.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the abyss. Once a Unitarian, Eliot converted to the Church of England in 1927 – the same year in which the Saint Louis-born author became a British subject. In a preface to his book For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1929), he famously identified his state of mind as being “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” This new spiritual awakening on Eliot’s part seems to inform works like the poem “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and the verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Like these works, Ash Wednesday shows Eliot taking on a commitment to the Christian faith – albeit in the same sort of at-once grim and resolute spirit that characterizes The Waste Land.
Ash Wednesday, dedicated to Eliot’s wife, starts off on a note of foreboding that will be familiar to readers of Eliot’s work:
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 toward such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign? (p. 9)
In this opening stanza, I enjoyed the subtle and restrained rhyme scheme, and thought that I heard a prefiguring of the world-weariness of the unnamed Magus who serves as persona of Eliot’s later “Journey of the Magi”; the Magus recalls the worldly pleasures of his earlier pagan life, but realizes grimly that, now that he has beheld the Christ Child and brought Him gifts, he is “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods”, and adds that “I should be glad of another death.” Similarly, the speaker of Ash Wednesday feels a fundamental dissatisfaction with life as it is, and realizes that he has permanently turned a corner.
Unsurprisingly, Ash Wednesday abounds in religious references, and in language and phraseology drawn directly from Christian liturgy, as when Eliot, in the first section of the poem, writes that he will “pray to God to have mercy upon us…/May the judgement not be too heavy upon us” and later adds, from the “Hail Mary”, the words “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death/Pray for us now and at the hour of our death” (p. 10). Here, one sees the Catholic elements in Eliot’s self-definition as an “Anglo-Catholic,” as the veneration of the Virgin Mary is an area of particular emphasis in the Catholic faith.
The second section of the poem begins with images of leopards feeding upon the speaker’s physical self, following with reflections that once that physical self is gone, “Because of the goodness of this Lady/And because of her loveliness, and because/She honours the Virgin in meditation,/We shine in brightness.” The imagery of a lady and leopards made me think of Flemish tapestries that I’ve seen in medieval castles across Western Europe.
The third section of Ash Wednesday involves images of turning on, and climbing, three stairs – a Trinitarian reference that also involves leaving one state behind and ascending toward another – and ends “beyond hope and despair”, with the speaker reciting “Lord, I am not worthy/Lord, I am not worthy/but speak the word only” (p. 15) – a reference to the Roman centurion in Chapter 8 of Saint Matthew’s Gospel who declared that he was not worthy for Jesus to enter his home, expressed his certainty that it would be enough for Jesus to speak a single word to heal the centurion’s servant, and was praised for his faith by Jesus.
Section IV of the poem criticizes people who are in the presence of grace, but who do not seem to realize or sense it -- people
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,
Talking of trivial things… (p. 16)
This part of the poem made me think of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), with its references to people treating the profound in a trivial manner – “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.”
The blue of Mary’s robe is evoked again – “blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,/Sovegna vos” (p. 16). The Italian means “be mindful,” and refers to a moment in Chapter 26 of Dante’s Purgatorio, when the Provençal poet Arnaud Daniel, expiating on the Seventh Terrace the sins of lust that he committed in his lifetime, asks Dante the Pilgrim to remember in good time Arnaud’s suffering in that place. Aside from providing a reference to one of Eliot’s own favourite writers (remember that Eliot once wrote that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third”), this reference may at once evoke the suffering of the souls in Purgatory and the self-conscious exile of any Christian soul in this fallen world.
And the theme of redemption is once again foregrounded, as the speaker calls for someone to “Redeem/The time. Redeem/The unread vision in the higher dream” (p. 16). Placing the word “Redeem” at the end of each of these non-end-stopped lines reminds the reader of the importance of redemption within the Christian tradition.
Section V of the poem seems to amount to an extended meditation on the beginning of Saint John’s Gospel, with its evocation of Jesus Christ as the living and immortal Word of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Eliot counterpoints the Word and the world:
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken Word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word. (p. 18)
The Word of God goes unlistened to, in the main, leaving “No place of grace for those who avoid the face/No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice” (p. 18). Against that backdrop of a faithless world comes Eliot’s invocation of Chapter 6 of the Book of Micah: “O my people, what have I done unto thee” (p. 19). In this passage, God is asking His people why they have abandoned Him; the connection to the other ideas being expressed by Eliot seems clear here.
Stanza VI returns to ideas and images of Section I – “Although I do not hope to turn again/Although I do not hope/Although I do not hope to turn”, and evokes his sense of the Christian’s sense of exile in a fallen world of getting and spending: “Wavering between the profit and the loss/In this brief transit where the dreams cross/The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying (Bless me father)” (p. 20). Note how Eliot closes these evocations of life as a transitory, dreamlike state with a parenthetical reference to the ritual of confession.
Against “the time of tension between dying and birth/The place of solitude where three dreams cross” (p.20), Eliot concludes with a call for speaker and listeners alike to listen to, and submit to, the Christian message:
Blessèd 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. (p. 21)
“Suffer me not to be separated” is taken from the Anima Christi (“Soul of Christ”), a medieval prayer to Jesus. “And let my cry come unto thee” comes from Psalm 102 – the work of King David, another man who questioned his earlier life of secular prominence and sought spiritual redemption. Readers who enjoy delving into the wealth of allusions that characteristically marks Eliot’s work will find plenty of just that sort of thing.
The edition of Ash Wednesday that I read was an original 1930 printing of the poem, published by Faber & Faber, London. It came to me as an Interlibrary Loan delivery from the University of Memphis, and is marked “Handle With Care” (I have heeded that admonition). The date stamped on the first page is June 8, 1955 – presumably the date on which the university that was then called Memphis State University acquired this copy of the book. Yet the provenance of the book goes back even further, as the name “K. Davey – 1931” is written in script on that first page, right below where some Memphis State librarian marked the book as MSU property back in 1955.
It made me wonder: how many hands has this book passed through – from K. Davey in 1931, through a Memphis State University librarian in 1955, through how many other readers, to me reading Eliot’s ideas on a screened-in back porch overlooking some woodlands in Manassas, Virginia, in the decade of the 2020's? And did they read Eliot’s words in a spirit of shared faith commitment, or in a more skeptical frame of mind? Whatever the different answers to those questions might be, I found Ash Wednesday to be a fascinating look inside the ever-changing, ever-evolving ideas of a great author, set forth with T.S. Eliot’s characteristic mix of rigour and grace.
January 22, 2019
I did not care for TS Eliot when I first read his poems. I thought he was an arrogant poet who wanted to write inaccessible poems solely for the literati. But I read him anyway — mostly because it was required of me.
As years go by, however, I find his lines come to my recollection more than pretty much any other poet. And I find I keep returning to his books, partly because they are a challenge, and partly because they are remarkably profound.
Ash-Wednesday is a small collection of poems, written during what could probably be described as a faith crisis, transition, or conversion. I knew that Eliot converted to Anglicanism, but I hadn’t read many of his religious poems prior to this. I believe Eliot displays tremendous insight here, and I think this book would be well worth any religiously inclined person’s time. There’s also some really excellent wordplay in these poems, especially #5.
As years go by, however, I find his lines come to my recollection more than pretty much any other poet. And I find I keep returning to his books, partly because they are a challenge, and partly because they are remarkably profound.
Ash-Wednesday is a small collection of poems, written during what could probably be described as a faith crisis, transition, or conversion. I knew that Eliot converted to Anglicanism, but I hadn’t read many of his religious poems prior to this. I believe Eliot displays tremendous insight here, and I think this book would be well worth any religiously inclined person’s time. There’s also some really excellent wordplay in these poems, especially #5.
July 28, 2014
با حرفهای بهزاد موافقم
با اینکه شان برخی کلمات را در انگلیسی برابر نگرفته، اما دقت در این کار هنر بیژن است که زیاده نرود، انقدر که متن الان زیاده کهن نمیزند، دست ببری در جملات میبینی گاهی از روی وزن کاری کرده و در کل ترجمهای که به دست داده جای شکر دارد. مثلن مقایسه کنید با چهار کوارتت که صمدی برگردانده و خب تقریبن غیر قابل فهم است.
با اینکه شان برخی کلمات را در انگلیسی برابر نگرفته، اما دقت در این کار هنر بیژن است که زیاده نرود، انقدر که متن الان زیاده کهن نمیزند، دست ببری در جملات میبینی گاهی از روی وزن کاری کرده و در کل ترجمهای که به دست داده جای شکر دارد. مثلن مقایسه کنید با چهار کوارتت که صمدی برگردانده و خب تقریبن غیر قابل فهم است.
December 26, 2018
"Because I know that time os always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place" p. 10
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place" p. 10
January 6, 2025
Eliot's religious poetry isn't my favorite (heathen that I am) and since it all started with "Ash-Wednesday" this poem has a special place in my heart (and not in a good way, lmao).
"Ash-Wednesday" is a long ass poem written by T. S. Eliot during his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, the poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God. *YAWN* Thus, "Ash-Wednesday" is often referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem". Based on Dante's Purgatorio (MY BELOVED), it deals with the move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates his conversion. "Ash-Wednesday" and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.
The poem’s title comes from the Western Christian fast day that marks the beginning of Lent, forty days before Easter. It is a poem about the difficulty of religious belief, and is concerned with personal salvation in an age of uncertainty. In "Ash Wednesday" Eliot’s poetic persona, one who has lacked faith in the past, has somehow found the courage, through spiritual exhaustion, to seek faith.
In the first section, Eliot introduces the idea of renunciation with a quote from Cavalcanti, in which the poet expresses his devotion to his lady as death approaches. Dante Gabriel Rossetti translated it under the title "Ballata, Written in Exile at Sarzana", and rendered the first line as "Because I do not hope to return". The idea of exile is thus also introduced.
When first published, the poem bore the dedication "To my wife", referring to Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, with whom he had a strained relationship, and from whom he initiated a legal separation in 1933. The dedication does not appear in subsequent editions. (OOP.)
Vladimir Nabokov parodied "Ash Wednesday" in his novel Lolita. In chapter 35 of Part Two of Nabokov's book, Humbert's versified "death sentence" on Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot's poem. Two lines from Ash Wednesday are slightly misremembered by the character Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris's book The Silence of the Lambs and the 1991 film adaptation thereof. In the poem, the lines read "Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still." In the book, Clarice recalls the latter line as "Teach us to be still." It is unclear whether this mistake is a genuine error of Harris's memory and/or research, or intentionally misquoted as a method of indirect characterization: Starling is described as well-read and intelligent, but more oriented toward action than she is toward academia.
Chris Marker uses the two lines "Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place" from "Ash Wednesday" as the epigraph to the English version of his film Sans Soleil. The French version of the film uses a quote from Racine.
"Ash-Wednesday" is a long ass poem written by T. S. Eliot during his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, the poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God. *YAWN* Thus, "Ash-Wednesday" is often referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem". Based on Dante's Purgatorio (MY BELOVED), it deals with the move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates his conversion. "Ash-Wednesday" and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.
The poem’s title comes from the Western Christian fast day that marks the beginning of Lent, forty days before Easter. It is a poem about the difficulty of religious belief, and is concerned with personal salvation in an age of uncertainty. In "Ash Wednesday" Eliot’s poetic persona, one who has lacked faith in the past, has somehow found the courage, through spiritual exhaustion, to seek faith.
In the first section, Eliot introduces the idea of renunciation with a quote from Cavalcanti, in which the poet expresses his devotion to his lady as death approaches. Dante Gabriel Rossetti translated it under the title "Ballata, Written in Exile at Sarzana", and rendered the first line as "Because I do not hope to return". The idea of exile is thus also introduced.
When first published, the poem bore the dedication "To my wife", referring to Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, with whom he had a strained relationship, and from whom he initiated a legal separation in 1933. The dedication does not appear in subsequent editions. (OOP.)
Vladimir Nabokov parodied "Ash Wednesday" in his novel Lolita. In chapter 35 of Part Two of Nabokov's book, Humbert's versified "death sentence" on Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot's poem. Two lines from Ash Wednesday are slightly misremembered by the character Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris's book The Silence of the Lambs and the 1991 film adaptation thereof. In the poem, the lines read "Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still." In the book, Clarice recalls the latter line as "Teach us to be still." It is unclear whether this mistake is a genuine error of Harris's memory and/or research, or intentionally misquoted as a method of indirect characterization: Starling is described as well-read and intelligent, but more oriented toward action than she is toward academia.
Chris Marker uses the two lines "Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place" from "Ash Wednesday" as the epigraph to the English version of his film Sans Soleil. The French version of the film uses a quote from Racine.
September 1, 2019
پیشنوشت: این کتاب شامل دو بخشه. چهارشنبهی خاکستر و ارض موات.
برگردان چهارشنبهی خاکستر خیلی خوبه و از اون بهتر یادداشتها و حاشیهنویسیهاییه که از کتاب مقدس، الهی جمعآوری کرده و متن رو بسیار قابلفهم و به خواننده نزدیک میکنه.
بخش بعدی این کتاب ارض مواته که ذکر شده با در و دوز (!) از الیوت که ترجمه و تلخیصی ناتمامه. این بخش به نظر من خیلی خیلی بد بود. زبان سرگردان
و روایت سرگردان شخصی، خیلی زیاد توی ذوق میزد و برای من تقریبا بیمعنا بود. بدتر اینکه عبارتهایی ترجمه نشده و پانویس نشده لابهلای متن هست که برای من سوال بود به چه هدفی چاپ شدن وقتی خواننده هیچ سرنخی ازش نداره
در مجموع این کتاب قابل رجوعه البته فقط و فقط برای خوندن متن چهارشنبهی خاکستر
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
باشد که سفیدیی استخانها، با فراموشی همساز شود.. در آنها نه حیاتی هست. ازانجا که من فراموشم و باشد که فراموش بمانم، پس باید که فراموش کنم
____________________________________________________________
بانوی خموشیها
آسودهخیال و پریش
دریده و بسیار درست
گل سرخ یاد
گل سرخ فراموشی
فرسوده و جان ـ بخش
آرمیده نگران
یک گل سرخ
اکنون باغست
که آنجا همهی عشقها میانجامد
عشقِ ناکام
با عذابی محدود
عشقِ برکام
با عذاب بزرگتر
پایانِ بیپایان
سفربیپایان
فرجامِ تمام آنچه
نافرجامست
سخنِ بیکلام و
کلام بیسخن
برگردان چهارشنبهی خاکستر خیلی خوبه و از اون بهتر یادداشتها و حاشیهنویسیهاییه که از کتاب مقدس، الهی جمعآوری کرده و متن رو بسیار قابلفهم و به خواننده نزدیک میکنه.
بخش بعدی این کتاب ارض مواته که ذکر شده با در و دوز (!) از الیوت که ترجمه و تلخیصی ناتمامه. این بخش به نظر من خیلی خیلی بد بود. زبان سرگردان
و روایت سرگردان شخصی، خیلی زیاد توی ذوق میزد و برای من تقریبا بیمعنا بود. بدتر اینکه عبارتهایی ترجمه نشده و پانویس نشده لابهلای متن هست که برای من سوال بود به چه هدفی چاپ شدن وقتی خواننده هیچ سرنخی ازش نداره
در مجموع این کتاب قابل رجوعه البته فقط و فقط برای خوندن متن چهارشنبهی خاکستر
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
باشد که سفیدیی استخانها، با فراموشی همساز شود.. در آنها نه حیاتی هست. ازانجا که من فراموشم و باشد که فراموش بمانم، پس باید که فراموش کنم
____________________________________________________________
بانوی خموشیها
آسودهخیال و پریش
دریده و بسیار درست
گل سرخ یاد
گل سرخ فراموشی
فرسوده و جان ـ بخش
آرمیده نگران
یک گل سرخ
اکنون باغست
که آنجا همهی عشقها میانجامد
عشقِ ناکام
با عذابی محدود
عشقِ برکام
با عذاب بزرگتر
پایانِ بیپایان
سفربیپایان
فرجامِ تمام آنچه
نافرجامست
سخنِ بیکلام و
کلام بیسخن
February 23, 2023
TRIGGER WARNING: DIARY-LIKE REVIEW. I NEED TO START WORRYING ABOUT MY ONLINE FOOTPRINT.
Back on my poetry. Not intentionally though. Tonight was a weird coincidence (if you believe in those).
I tried reading T.S. Eliot last week in the library and got lost. Didn't understand. Class was about to start, so I put the book back and forgot about it.
Today was a hard day for me. And not a fluke hard day. I would define it as a real hard day. I didn't really partake in Ash Wednesday for a multitude of reasons. I cancelled my Bible study tonight. I am coming off of a near college drop out attempt. Yadda yadda yadda.
I went to a quiet place to do an interview call for a story I'm writing. My source did not show up, but I saw books on the shelf. I went over and scanned half the wall. Then I saw a little T.S. Eliot book and decided I was up for the challenge one more time.
Kid you not, randomly flipped to a poem entitled "Ash Wednesday." Well, actually, I ran my thumb along the side of the book as if it was some sort of flipbook animation, and my eyes happened to focus on a page that said "Ash Wednesday." So I spent the next 30 seconds trying to find it again. But I will still call this a coincidence for the sake of the story.
All of this to say I related a lot to this work. Especially the front end. It was hard to understand, and I reread everything like 10 times. I don't know how long it'll be until I read Eliot again. But I liked it.
Here are some of my favorite parts:
"And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss.
Too much explain."
"Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose."
"Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the
rocks"
"This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks"
"And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voice"
Back on my poetry. Not intentionally though. Tonight was a weird coincidence (if you believe in those).
I tried reading T.S. Eliot last week in the library and got lost. Didn't understand. Class was about to start, so I put the book back and forgot about it.
Today was a hard day for me. And not a fluke hard day. I would define it as a real hard day. I didn't really partake in Ash Wednesday for a multitude of reasons. I cancelled my Bible study tonight. I am coming off of a near college drop out attempt. Yadda yadda yadda.
I went to a quiet place to do an interview call for a story I'm writing. My source did not show up, but I saw books on the shelf. I went over and scanned half the wall. Then I saw a little T.S. Eliot book and decided I was up for the challenge one more time.
Kid you not, randomly flipped to a poem entitled "Ash Wednesday." Well, actually, I ran my thumb along the side of the book as if it was some sort of flipbook animation, and my eyes happened to focus on a page that said "Ash Wednesday." So I spent the next 30 seconds trying to find it again. But I will still call this a coincidence for the sake of the story.
All of this to say I related a lot to this work. Especially the front end. It was hard to understand, and I reread everything like 10 times. I don't know how long it'll be until I read Eliot again. But I liked it.
Here are some of my favorite parts:
"And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss.
Too much explain."
"Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose."
"Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the
rocks"
"This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks"
"And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voice"
March 19, 2022
I was blessed with a first edition of this book through my local library, and it was a joy to read, both because of its age (92 years old) and because of the poem itself. There were generous blank pages before and after the poem, which isn't really a "long" poem as the description suggested. I was suggesting some epic "Song of Myself" or "The Bridge", but instead got a cozy, wonderful little poem.
The poem is split into 6 sections, with the first and last sections both starting with the same classic lines:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
The poem to me seems to start off as Eliot still being a nonchristian, but open to Christianity. He displays a deep understanding of Christian humility, a desire for a lack of desire, but at the same time a strange notion of time and place, the atheistic eternal present, the attempt to rejoice for things as they are, being content with the World, not seeking God yet, imagining that he can somehow "rejoice, having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice". All with wisdom understand that it's a titanic undertaking to "create your own truth", or make your own meaning for your life, as secularists demand.
There is a strange little bit of ambiguity regarding the point of view in the middle of the first section, when he writes:
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And [I] pray that I may forget
The first edition and the MIT web version of this section include the [I], while another version doesn't. I remember initially reading the section with an "I" in both lines, until I re-read the section. Is Eliot telling someone else to pray for him, or is he already praying to God? Is this act of prayer his first act as a Christian? I like that it's left ambiguous. We have a similar ambiguity at the end of the first section with the two lines:
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
The term "sinner" tends to hit non-christians very hard, and many balk at the label ("May the judgement not be too heavy upon us"). This almost feels like a continuation of the aforementioned two about prayer, where one is from his Christian perspective, the other is from his secular perspective, asking someone else to pray for him. Just before this ending, he seems to include himself in the "we" of Christians, saying: "Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still."
At this point, paradox is still holding everything in tension, and the lines are not as lyrical as they soar near the end. Things are in chaos, and, not to toot my own horn, but the next two sections (2 & 3) remind me of my own poetry, of the violent, sudden imagery I like using, of the Stephen Crane-esq, mysterious mini-stories told within these strange images. Section 2 is abounding with imagery from the "valley of dry bones" and how Eliot is violently stripped of his old, sinful flesh, which is eaten by white leopards. Three keywords: white, bones, and leopards continue throughout the section, and the first, "white", continues throughout the poem, especially in section 4. The white gown mentioned in this section could point to the wedding imagery Christ uses concerning judgement (which would tie the judgement of the first section to this section), or it could even refer to the white baptismal gown babies wear when being baptized.
Hauntingly, there are "My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions / Which the leopards reject", which could refer to original sin or perhaps to the leftover doubts, the bad habits he still has, something that still feels off despite the cleansing feast of the leopards. His bones have wind run through them, Pneuma (Greek: breath = spirit, same word), the spirit of life, the Spirit of God, and they sing a haunting song.
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.
These opposites juxtapose into beautiful paradoxes, which are the stuff of religious wisdom and belief. The garden imagery is prevalent, Edenic, and the "cool of the day" refers to the point at which the innocence was detected explicitly by God, when man was made aware of his own loss, his own folly, just as Eliot, a new convert, is blindingly aware. And the fourth section blinds with the brightness... but first we must endure the darkness of the third section.
In this section, we must trudge up the dark stairs with demons on the banisters, fog in the air, stairsteps like shark seeth, damp and drivelling like a gaping old man, like death. And outside, the haunting sound of Pan's lute, of Bacchus, tempting both old Christian and new convert alike, to abandon the stairs, to run out and play. Eliot is sustained by the simple Law and Gospel:
Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.
Finally, we escape the stairs, we enter the white and blue of Mary, the spring of water in the desert. It is here, this turning point, at which things become more lyrical, even more fun to read aloud. The entire poem deserves to be read aloud, but especially the second half. The assonance, alliteration, rhyming, repetition, etc. becomes dense enough to capture you and hold you down. But instead you climb atop it and see farther because of it. The movement and walking of the last section continues, and a new riddle is held out to us: "Redeem the time, redeem the dream". Some of these lines densely dance between two vowel sounds, imploring the reader to get up and follow along.
Eliot seems to ram headfirst into the Word being God, and in disbelief at his luck, being a poet, and God, creating with poetry, he falters in a glorious way:
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
This perhaps is wrestling with the dilemma of those who haven't heard about Christ, or perhaps it's just disbelief at how plain it is, how supreme the word is, yet how rarely it's heard. We next have a complaint that nowhere in the world is there enough silence (dude, imagine things about 1,000x worse here in the 21st century), and his complaint travels over all the world. His fears continue from the first part of this section, and his statement at the start is flipped as well:
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not her
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice
Eliot sees himself as now more enlightened, but he must go back, he realizes he must join "the veiled sister", Mary, his fellow members of the Church, traditionally rendered a feminine plural, who must:
pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness
At the end of the section, Eliot wonders aloud if the "veiled sister" will believe the hardest command of Christ, to pray for those who persecute her (and by extension he wonders at his own ability to do so). At the end of the section they spit out the "bad seed" (as Metallica would word it), and we see a return to the start of the poem, and a return to the world, a reaching out to the World, as we Christians term it, the secular, the hope mentioned in section 1, which had negative echoes in section 3 ("The deceitful face of hope and of despair."). Eliot ultimately finds peace and "centre" in the paradox, in the tension which, once taut, teaches one what one must be taught:
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
Eliot is now going to confession, now part of the Christian community, now is communing with the saints, with the "Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit / of the garden," for it is here, in this paradox, this tension, that He (and we) can:
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
And my single gripe about this poem, other than that it should have been longer, is that it didn't stop right at "these rocks". The ending after that feels a little pantheistic and bleh, but overall I adore this poem, and I most of all adore how it gains meaning the more times you read it, it wraps right back around to the start at the end. You start to understand the little ways how the tension at the start gets resolved in the second half. This poem has to be some semblance of how it must feel to see God's plan for history laid out, and why everything went the way it did. He'll pull out his compass and draw the lines that connect the dots we were too blind to see. This is faith, a living tension, a living faith, an Ash Wednesday, which, in its own way, is a cyclical day of the cyclical church year, where the palm fronds from the last year's Palm Sunday are used to mark you as one redeemed, along with the "time" and the "dream". Wonderful.
The poem is split into 6 sections, with the first and last sections both starting with the same classic lines:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
The poem to me seems to start off as Eliot still being a nonchristian, but open to Christianity. He displays a deep understanding of Christian humility, a desire for a lack of desire, but at the same time a strange notion of time and place, the atheistic eternal present, the attempt to rejoice for things as they are, being content with the World, not seeking God yet, imagining that he can somehow "rejoice, having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice". All with wisdom understand that it's a titanic undertaking to "create your own truth", or make your own meaning for your life, as secularists demand.
There is a strange little bit of ambiguity regarding the point of view in the middle of the first section, when he writes:
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And [I] pray that I may forget
The first edition and the MIT web version of this section include the [I], while another version doesn't. I remember initially reading the section with an "I" in both lines, until I re-read the section. Is Eliot telling someone else to pray for him, or is he already praying to God? Is this act of prayer his first act as a Christian? I like that it's left ambiguous. We have a similar ambiguity at the end of the first section with the two lines:
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
The term "sinner" tends to hit non-christians very hard, and many balk at the label ("May the judgement not be too heavy upon us"). This almost feels like a continuation of the aforementioned two about prayer, where one is from his Christian perspective, the other is from his secular perspective, asking someone else to pray for him. Just before this ending, he seems to include himself in the "we" of Christians, saying: "Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still."
At this point, paradox is still holding everything in tension, and the lines are not as lyrical as they soar near the end. Things are in chaos, and, not to toot my own horn, but the next two sections (2 & 3) remind me of my own poetry, of the violent, sudden imagery I like using, of the Stephen Crane-esq, mysterious mini-stories told within these strange images. Section 2 is abounding with imagery from the "valley of dry bones" and how Eliot is violently stripped of his old, sinful flesh, which is eaten by white leopards. Three keywords: white, bones, and leopards continue throughout the section, and the first, "white", continues throughout the poem, especially in section 4. The white gown mentioned in this section could point to the wedding imagery Christ uses concerning judgement (which would tie the judgement of the first section to this section), or it could even refer to the white baptismal gown babies wear when being baptized.
Hauntingly, there are "My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions / Which the leopards reject", which could refer to original sin or perhaps to the leftover doubts, the bad habits he still has, something that still feels off despite the cleansing feast of the leopards. His bones have wind run through them, Pneuma (Greek: breath = spirit, same word), the spirit of life, the Spirit of God, and they sing a haunting song.
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.
These opposites juxtapose into beautiful paradoxes, which are the stuff of religious wisdom and belief. The garden imagery is prevalent, Edenic, and the "cool of the day" refers to the point at which the innocence was detected explicitly by God, when man was made aware of his own loss, his own folly, just as Eliot, a new convert, is blindingly aware. And the fourth section blinds with the brightness... but first we must endure the darkness of the third section.
In this section, we must trudge up the dark stairs with demons on the banisters, fog in the air, stairsteps like shark seeth, damp and drivelling like a gaping old man, like death. And outside, the haunting sound of Pan's lute, of Bacchus, tempting both old Christian and new convert alike, to abandon the stairs, to run out and play. Eliot is sustained by the simple Law and Gospel:
Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.
Finally, we escape the stairs, we enter the white and blue of Mary, the spring of water in the desert. It is here, this turning point, at which things become more lyrical, even more fun to read aloud. The entire poem deserves to be read aloud, but especially the second half. The assonance, alliteration, rhyming, repetition, etc. becomes dense enough to capture you and hold you down. But instead you climb atop it and see farther because of it. The movement and walking of the last section continues, and a new riddle is held out to us: "Redeem the time, redeem the dream". Some of these lines densely dance between two vowel sounds, imploring the reader to get up and follow along.
Eliot seems to ram headfirst into the Word being God, and in disbelief at his luck, being a poet, and God, creating with poetry, he falters in a glorious way:
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
This perhaps is wrestling with the dilemma of those who haven't heard about Christ, or perhaps it's just disbelief at how plain it is, how supreme the word is, yet how rarely it's heard. We next have a complaint that nowhere in the world is there enough silence (dude, imagine things about 1,000x worse here in the 21st century), and his complaint travels over all the world. His fears continue from the first part of this section, and his statement at the start is flipped as well:
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not her
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice
Eliot sees himself as now more enlightened, but he must go back, he realizes he must join "the veiled sister", Mary, his fellow members of the Church, traditionally rendered a feminine plural, who must:
pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness
At the end of the section, Eliot wonders aloud if the "veiled sister" will believe the hardest command of Christ, to pray for those who persecute her (and by extension he wonders at his own ability to do so). At the end of the section they spit out the "bad seed" (as Metallica would word it), and we see a return to the start of the poem, and a return to the world, a reaching out to the World, as we Christians term it, the secular, the hope mentioned in section 1, which had negative echoes in section 3 ("The deceitful face of hope and of despair."). Eliot ultimately finds peace and "centre" in the paradox, in the tension which, once taut, teaches one what one must be taught:
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
Eliot is now going to confession, now part of the Christian community, now is communing with the saints, with the "Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit / of the garden," for it is here, in this paradox, this tension, that He (and we) can:
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
And my single gripe about this poem, other than that it should have been longer, is that it didn't stop right at "these rocks". The ending after that feels a little pantheistic and bleh, but overall I adore this poem, and I most of all adore how it gains meaning the more times you read it, it wraps right back around to the start at the end. You start to understand the little ways how the tension at the start gets resolved in the second half. This poem has to be some semblance of how it must feel to see God's plan for history laid out, and why everything went the way it did. He'll pull out his compass and draw the lines that connect the dots we were too blind to see. This is faith, a living tension, a living faith, an Ash Wednesday, which, in its own way, is a cyclical day of the cyclical church year, where the palm fronds from the last year's Palm Sunday are used to mark you as one redeemed, along with the "time" and the "dream". Wonderful.
July 20, 2015
بیژن الهی روزم رو ساخت... عالی بود، عالی...
December 8, 2020
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.
March 5, 2025
"Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks"
One of Eliot's best Christian works, though I might be biased by all the allusions to Dante.
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks"
One of Eliot's best Christian works, though I might be biased by all the allusions to Dante.
April 30, 2021
T.S.Eliot writes in an unique, personal language.. There is nothing comparable for so many years and centuries (more likely)...
July 3, 2024
“
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
[…]
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
“
(VI)
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
[…]
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
“
(VI)
March 29, 2020
"Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death."
"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."
"Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs"
Eliot rămâne pentru mine exemplul cel mai grăitor că pentru a produce poezie nu va fi niciodată îndeajuns doar căutarea construcției unui imaginar atașant (deci asumarea unei funcții vizuale a textului), ci că totodată va fi nevoie și de îndeplinirea unei funcții sonice/muzicale a acestuia. Poezia nu va fi niciodată doar imagine proiectată mental, ci și cuvânt rostit, iar Eliot reușește (aproape) întotdeauna să calibreze aceste două (din multe alte) spații ce ajută la geneza poeziei, oferindu-i cititorului serii întregi de texte în care muzicalitatea e resimțită drept trăsătură fundamentală.
February 14, 2013
Like all T.S. Elliot poems of this era it is a masterwork. I found, for the third time, a self-narrated audio version of an Eliot poem. I felt that since today was Ash Wednesday there was no better time to listened to this. This poem is significant for being the first poem Eliot wrote after his conversion and he seems to be really making up for "lost" time in this poem.
[I will be doing a more thorough review at a later date]
[I will be doing a more thorough review at a later date]
August 16, 2022
A fine expression of modernist faith. So, stillness/God is a desperate longing/conjuring that the world be other than a waste land.
Read
August 23, 2024Um breve murmúrio musicado entre o silêncio e o pranto. Um caminho da redenção oscilando entre o esquecimento e a plenitude face à eterna mudança. Poderemos assumir que o lugar faz o sábio? Quem tem acesso a sair das trevas para uma qualquer transcedência? Um privilégio? Numa nota mais global, a sabedoria reforça a espiritualidade e a praticalidade da vida. Ao mesmo tempo, é ferramenta de controlo pela sua ambiguidade quando é proferida de cima como doutrina. Uma faca de dois legumes, como diz o outro.
Ainda assim, que um dos amores da nossa vida possa ser um lugar, é aquilo que me ocorre em alguns dos versos que mais apelam à subjetividade. O tempo que não volta, o espaço-tempo vivido ali, em comunhão com todo o passado e o arrependimento, neste caminho redentor do pecado, a pedir um esquecimento a Deus, uma abébia, um conforto momentâneo, talvez supersticioso, que repudie qualquer chama do inferno. Abaixo uns trechos:
"Não aqui, aqui não há silêncio bastante
Nem no mar ou nas ilhas, nem
Na terra firme, no deserto ou nas regiões pluviosas,
Para aqueles que caminham nas trevas
Tanto durante o dia como durante a noite
A hora certa e o lugar certo são aqui
Não há lugar de conforto para os que evitam o rosto
Não há hora de júbilo para os que caminham por entre o ruído
e renunciam à voz"
...
"Porque eu não espero conhecer de novo
A glória frágil da hora concreta
Porque eu não penso
Porque eu sei que não conhecerei
O único poder transitório verdadeiro
Porque eu não posso beber
Lá, onde as árvores florescem, e jorram as fontes, nada é outra vez"
Porque eu sei que o tempo é sempre tempo
E o lugar é sempre e somente o lugar
E o que é real é-o uma vez somente
E somente para um lugar
Eu rejubilo porque as coisas são como são e
Renuncio ao rosto bendito
E renuncio à voz
Porque eu não posso esperar voltar de novo
Consequentemente rejubilo, tendo de erigir algo
Sobre que rejubilar
E rogo a Deus que se amerceie de nós
E rogo que me faça esquecer
Estas questões que comigo demasiado discorro"
Ainda assim, que um dos amores da nossa vida possa ser um lugar, é aquilo que me ocorre em alguns dos versos que mais apelam à subjetividade. O tempo que não volta, o espaço-tempo vivido ali, em comunhão com todo o passado e o arrependimento, neste caminho redentor do pecado, a pedir um esquecimento a Deus, uma abébia, um conforto momentâneo, talvez supersticioso, que repudie qualquer chama do inferno. Abaixo uns trechos:
"Não aqui, aqui não há silêncio bastante
Nem no mar ou nas ilhas, nem
Na terra firme, no deserto ou nas regiões pluviosas,
Para aqueles que caminham nas trevas
Tanto durante o dia como durante a noite
A hora certa e o lugar certo são aqui
Não há lugar de conforto para os que evitam o rosto
Não há hora de júbilo para os que caminham por entre o ruído
e renunciam à voz"
...
"Porque eu não espero conhecer de novo
A glória frágil da hora concreta
Porque eu não penso
Porque eu sei que não conhecerei
O único poder transitório verdadeiro
Porque eu não posso beber
Lá, onde as árvores florescem, e jorram as fontes, nada é outra vez"
Porque eu sei que o tempo é sempre tempo
E o lugar é sempre e somente o lugar
E o que é real é-o uma vez somente
E somente para um lugar
Eu rejubilo porque as coisas são como são e
Renuncio ao rosto bendito
E renuncio à voz
Porque eu não posso esperar voltar de novo
Consequentemente rejubilo, tendo de erigir algo
Sobre que rejubilar
E rogo a Deus que se amerceie de nós
E rogo que me faça esquecer
Estas questões que comigo demasiado discorro"
March 10, 2025
Denna diktsamling är kort, men oerhörd. Dels eftersom den är så medeltida i sitt formspråk, men framförallt eftersom den är så oerhört genuin. Jag gillar i allmänhet Eliot. Jag skall vara ärlig med det. Detta är knappast något slags objektiv recension, och jag är oavsett vad inte litteraturvetare. Vad det däremot är, kanske är något slags invitation för fler att läsa honom. Detta är en avsiktlig parafras på Cavalcanti, och det var så jag hittade den. En text om förändringar i tro, formulerad på det genuina sätt som lyrik, i motsats till rationalism, erbjuder.
February 3, 2018
Um homem que, tendo estado longe de Deus, O procura com sofreguidão. É o que a poesia tem de ser.
Porque eu sei que o tempo é sempre tempo
E o lugar é sempre e somente o lugar
E o que é real é-o uma vez somente
E somente para um lugar
Eu rejubilo porque as coisas são como são e
Renuncio ao rosto bendito
E renuncio à voz
Porque eu não posso esperar voltar de novo.
Porque eu sei que o tempo é sempre tempo
E o lugar é sempre e somente o lugar
E o que é real é-o uma vez somente
E somente para um lugar
Eu rejubilo porque as coisas são como são e
Renuncio ao rosto bendito
E renuncio à voz
Porque eu não posso esperar voltar de novo.
September 4, 2017
"Because I know that 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
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice"
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice"
March 6, 2019
How do you even review poetry?
To me, you can't, so I will just mention this quote:
"Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still."
To me, you can't, so I will just mention this quote:
"Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still."
February 22, 2020
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice.
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice.
September 7, 2021
A very personal poem by Elliot expressing his desires and struggles to achieve a divine path through devoted spirituality through the Word of God forsaking the sins of the flesh.
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May 9, 2023"No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among
noise and deny the voice."
No time to rejoice for those who walk among
noise and deny the voice."
October 20, 2025
I have such a love-hate relationship with T.S. Eliot.
March 19, 2020
3.5 stars
August 19, 2017
T. S. Eliot is a child at play, in the shores of eden or hell for no one can tell. He plays with sand and words and dry rocks and wet rocks. He puts in word into word; word then word; word unto world and world unto word, and word and word, and world and world. And he does it so beautifully. So beautifully.
In him, we walk down the river of words, beating, rhyming, in simile and in contrast, in Dante and in Shakespeare, and in Christianity and in Culturanity. In this river, we see the real zombies; ones with words unspoken, thoughts unheard. The zombies, who are men ripped of meaning and men ripped of sense. Living, yet dead. Dead, yet living. And still, the clock is cocked and winded, and then it chirrups and rewinds and we go back and forth.
Ash Wednesday is an epic, and I can and cannot imagine it otherwise, and I need only myself to tell the difference, and the zombie to tell the contradiction. So beautifully.
In him, we walk down the river of words, beating, rhyming, in simile and in contrast, in Dante and in Shakespeare, and in Christianity and in Culturanity. In this river, we see the real zombies; ones with words unspoken, thoughts unheard. The zombies, who are men ripped of meaning and men ripped of sense. Living, yet dead. Dead, yet living. And still, the clock is cocked and winded, and then it chirrups and rewinds and we go back and forth.
Ash Wednesday is an epic, and I can and cannot imagine it otherwise, and I need only myself to tell the difference, and the zombie to tell the contradiction. So beautifully.
November 7, 2016
thus, tonight i finished the eliot course in my syllabus. still, can anyone finish reading eliot? this is a rhetorical question. this great mind makes me think in so many ways. so, there's this sense of lack in reading eliot, still. one should keep going on and on.
"ash wednesday" is one of those poems.
with this, i bid you goodnight. i feel so peaceful, where being atheist does not matter right now. so peaceful (till now). goonight!
"ash wednesday" is one of those poems.
with this, i bid you goodnight. i feel so peaceful, where being atheist does not matter right now. so peaceful (till now). goonight!
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