Today is Ash Wednesday. Over the years on Ash Wednesday I have highlight a particular part of T. S. Eliot’s poem, “Ash Wednesday.” So far I have highlighted the first three of the six parts of the poem. Let me link you to the posts on the first three parts:
Part 1 (Posted on February 22, 2023) here.
Part II (Posted on February 13, 2013) here.
Part III (Posted on February 18, 2015) here and again (Posted February 14, 2024) here.
If
Part I can be summarized as an acknowledgement of sin and the turn for repentance,
and Part II as the suffering of penance and the request of prayer from a lady
of silence, and Part III as a passing through of Purgatory, we come to Part
IV.
IV
Who walked between the
violet and the violet
Who 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
Made cool the dry rock
and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue
of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos
Here are the years that
walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the
flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time
between sleep and waking, wearing
White light folded,
sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk,
restoring
Through a bright cloud of
tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the
ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the
higher dream
While jewelled unicorns
draw by the gilded hearse.
The silent sister veiled
in white and blue
Between the yews, behind
the garden god,
Whose flute is
breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word
But the fountain sprang
up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem
the dream
The token of the word
unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a
thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile
If you want to read the entire poem, you can do so here.
How
can we summarize Part IV? Is the penitent
still undergoing purgation? Or has he
let out of purgation? In Dante’s Divine Comedy on which this poem uses
greatly, when Dante the character passes through the final purgatorial
cleansing, he comes to an earthly paradise, the paradise of Adam and Eve. Is this what Eliot is describing here? Perhaps.
What the character of the poem is aware of is the color blue, the color
of the Blessed Virgin Mary. What is
redeemed here above all is time: “Redeem/The Time.” That is quite profound actually. All our sins are committed in time, and
therefore time itself has been violated.
Our redemption includes the redemption of the time and place. The narrator goes on to redeem all in a
magnificent vision:
,,,Redeem
The unread vision in the
higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
That is a difficult passage to untangle, but what I think Eliot is getting at is that redemption what was muddied by sin will be transformed into something transcendent. “Hearse” suggests a death—perhaps the death of his sin or sinful nature—but now driven away by “jeweled unicorns”! What vision or dream is he referring to? My guess is that in Part II of his scattered bones and his body being fed upon by a leopard. That image being drawn away in a gilded hearse by unicorns is a magnificent image of redemption.
And
to conclude the passage Eliot has the Blessed Virgin praying from which a
fountain emerges spouting water. This is
a symbol of redemption through baptism.
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