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 four of the six parts of the poem. Let me link you to the posts on the first four 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.
Part IV (Posted on March 5, 2025) here.
If Part I can be
summarized as an acknowledgement of personal sin and the turn for repentance, Part
II as the suffering of penance and the request of prayer from a lady of
silence, Part III as a passing through of Purgatory, and Part IV as the transcendence
of sin, we come to Part V.
V
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.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
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 here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and
deny the voice
Will the veiled sister 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? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
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
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.
O my people.
There are four stanzas with a refrain. The refrain comes between stanzas one and two, between three and four, and clipped at the end as a coda. Why isn’t there a refrain between stanzas two and three? I don’t know. Perhaps just to make Part V asymmetric.
How does one read the
refrain, “O my people, what have I done unto thee?” One might read it with a sense of remorse
with a tone of guilt. However, the
refrain is an actual quote from the Book of the Prophet Micah 6:3. Here is the quote in context:
Hear what the Lord says:
Arise, plead your case before the mountains,
and let the
hills hear your voice.
2 Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the Lord,
and you
enduring foundations of the earth;
for the Lord has a controversy with his people,
and he will
contend with Israel.
3 “O my people, what have I done to you?
In what have
I wearied you? Answer me!
4 For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
and redeemed
you from the house of bondage;
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and
Miriam.
5 O my people, remember what Balak king of Moab
devised,
and what
Balaam the son of Be′or answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.” (Mic 6:1-5)
As you can see, the verse
that Eliot uses as a refrain is spoken by God in Micah with a tone of
anger and indignation, as if God is saying, “what have I done to deserve this?” Let’s check Eliot’s tone reading the poem. Part V starts at 8:05 and ends at 10:12.
It sounds like indignation to me. Eliot is channeling God’s indignant voice at least for the refrain. But is he then channeling God’s voice throughout the poem? Is that God speaking in indignation in all of Part V? It is interesting that Part V is the only section of the entire poem that does not appear to be in first person. It is possible that Part V is the voice of God entering the poem.
It is interesting that stanzas one is framed in the conditional case: “If the lost world is lost,” Stanzas two, three, and four are framed in the interrogative case: “Where shall the word be found,” “Will the veiled sister pray,” and again “Will the veiled sister…pray.” Framing in a conditional and interrogative cases creates an imagery less specific, more amorphous, and less incorporeal. That might also suggest a more spiritual or God voice.
The first stanza, except for the images of light and darkness, is built around abstractions. “Word” and “word,” “spoken,” “unspoken,” “still,” “unstill,” lost, and “spent.” Of all the nouns to identify Christ, Eliot chooses the most abstract here, “the Word .” Significantly, the “Word is unheard.” I suspect this is the voice of God condemning a sinful people.
The second stanza asks ““Where shall the word be found”? Not here, and Eliot provides a sequence of very specific nouns of the earth. The earth is too noisy. “There is not enough silence.” It is too busy for holiness and repentance.
The third and fourth stanzas, the voice of—and I think it is God—asks the “veiled sister” to pray for those who cannot. He asks her to pray for “those who walk in darkness.” The veiled sister comes up several times in the overarching poem, and in Part VI we see the veiled sister is the “holy mother.” Humanity is identified as having spit “from the mouth the withered apple-seed,” the image of man tainted with original sin.
The first two stanzas signal the need for Christ (the Word) for acceptance and redemption in this “noisy” world. Stanzas three and four asks whether the Blessed Virgin (the veiled sister) will pray as intercessor for our redemption. The answer theologically of course is yes, she will intercede for us; the real question for me is whether we will accept the grace that comes from her intercession.
In Part V of “Ash Wednesday,” then, we see God in judgement of man, but offering the possibility through the intercession of the Blessed Mother the means of redemption.
Next year we will read
and analyze the final section. Have a
holy Ash Wednesday and blessed season of Lent.
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