Poetry: “Ash Wednesday, Part V” by T. S. Eliot

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.

 

Poetry: “Ash Wednesday, Part IV” by T. S. Eliot

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. 

 

Poetry Analysis: “The Quickening of John the Baptist” by Thomas Merton

Yesterday, August 29^th was the Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist, and you can read and pray more about it here at Catholic Culture.  

In my reading of the accolades to St. John the Baptist, I was also directed to a poem Thomas Merton wrote on St. John, not on his beheading but on his leap in his mother's womb when the Blessed Virgin arrived at her visitation to Elizabeth. I was absolutely floored by the beauty of this poem, "The Quickening of John the Baptist."  I want to present it here and provide a little analysis.  First the poem.

 

The Quickening of John the Baptist

On the Contemplative Vocation

By Thomas Merton

 

Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,

From the sands and the lavender water?

Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,

The yellow fishing boats, the farms,

The winesmelling yards and low cellars

Or the oilpress, and the women by the well?

Why do you fly those markets,

Those suburban gardens,

The trumpets of the jealous lilies,

Leaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?

 

You have trusted no town

With the news behind your eyes.

You have drowned Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas

And turned toward the stone mountain

To the treeless places.

Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?

 

The day Our Lady, full of Christ,

Entered the dooryard of her relative

Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves

like gold?

Did not her eyes as grey as doves

Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon

miraculous Elizabeth?

 

Her salutation

Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:

And the unborn saint John

Wakes in his mother’s body,

Bounds with the echoes of discovery.

 

Sing in your cell, small anchorite!

How did you see her in the eyeless dark?

What secret syllable

Woke your young faith to the mad truth

That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?

Oh burning joy!

 

What seas of life were planted by that voice!

With what new sense

Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament,

And know her cloistered Christ?

 

You need no eloquence, wild bairn,

Exulting in your hermitage.

Your ecstasy is your apostolate,

For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.

Your joy is the vocation of Mother Church’s hidden children -

Those who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage;

The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,

The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare, Planted in the night of

contemplation, Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.

 

Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry

Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied sermon.

Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air

Seeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.

We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners

With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:

Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,

Planted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.

 

But in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos

Flying the prosperous world

Appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails,

Then, like the wise, wild baby,

The unborn John who could not see a thing

We wake and know the Virgin Presence

Receive her Christ into our night

With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.

 

Cooled in the flame of God’s dark fire

Washed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame

We burn like eagles in His invincible awareness

And bound and bounce with happiness,

Leap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,

Our contemplation, our anticipated heaven

Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.

 

The poem is in free verse with ten stanzas, or perhaps more accurately, ten sections that are separated by a space since they are so irregular I’m not sure “stanza” would apply.  The poem starts with the Virgin Mary off on her visitation to her cousin Elizabeth, who pregnant with St. John the Baptist.  If you number the sections of the poem from one through ten, I can summarize the narrative flow and gist of each.  Here is my section by section gist.

1 – Addressing the Blessed Virgin, the poet asks why are you traveling across the country?

2 – Still addressing the Virgin, the poet highlights points on the journey and asks her why her clothes are like sails?

3 – The poet narrates her arrival.

4 – The poet narrates Mary’s greeting and the awakening of St. John in the womb at the sound of her voice.

5 – The poet addresses John and asks how in his enclosed space could he see and hear the Blessed Mother?

6 – The poet still addressing John asks what her voice did to him, and to know she was carrying Christ?

7 – Still addressing John, the poet acknowledges the child’s in ability to speak except through the kick in the womb.

8 – Perhaps the key section of the poem where the poet contemplates John’s silence and enclosure and identifies it with the plight of humanity.

9 – The poet continuing his contemplation connects John’s pre-birth existence with the existential nature of humanity.

10 – The poet concludes his contemplation with a final identification of John, the poet, and the reader before Christ.

 “The Quickening” in the title refers to the moment St. John in the womb is enlivened by the presence and voice of the Virgin carrying her own child, the Christ.  So much of the poem is about contemplation.  The subtitle of the poem is “On the Contemplative Vocation,” which identifies John as fetus, in a contemplative vocation.  Perhaps all fetuses have the vocation—at least for those “cloistered” nine months—of a contemplative.  Indeed, in section seven, Merton identifies contemplative and cloistered religious orders: Trappists, Carthusians, Carmelites, and Poor Clares.  We know that Merton himself was a Trappist monk bound to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.  And while it is not true that Trappists are never allowed to speak, they are required to limit their speech to only what is necessary.  So you can see how Merton as poet connects with John in the womb, the “small anchorite.”  An anchorite (or anchoress for feminine) is someone who is locked in a cell for the rest of their lives to pray and contemplate.  

There is also the contemplation identified with the Blessed Mother of God.  “But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Lk 2:19).  The Blessed Mother was witness to most of Christ’s life and His death, and so contemplated much.  Contemplation for Catholics starts with Mary.  In the poem she is identified with the sea—which connects with her title as Stella Maris, Our Lady of the Sea.  The vast sea has often through the ages been seen as an instrument that inspires contemplation.  To be on the sea and on a boat is to be isolated from society, and of course being submerged or drowned is a metaphor for the act of contemplation or being lost in thought.  (See the poem, “The Love Song of J. AlfredPrufrock” by T. S. Eliot and how he associates drowning with contemplation.)  When in section two Merton addresses Mary as having “drowned Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas,” he is referring the Archangel’s words to Mary at the Annunciation.  She hasn’t discarded Gabriel’s words, but submerged them in her consciousness for later meditation.  Why are her clothes like sails?  Because she is navigating an ocean of introspective thought.

###

The first seven sections of the poem establishes the context for the last three sections as they culminate to a thesis.  Let’s look at the last three more closely.

“Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry/Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied sermon.”

Who is “our” referring to?  The poet as he identifies with St. John in the womb, and I would venture all of us reading who can similarly identify.  The darkness constitutes their church, and silence the ministry, that is the administering of a religious action.  “Poverty” and “helplessness” convey a beatitude in the limitations of transmitting the message, almost an echo of “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Mt5:3). 

“Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air/Seeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.”

Again, the “we” unifies the poet, St. John, and the reader, caught in a moment of anticipation, waiting for what I would guess is the incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity, building to the last four lines which need to be quoted together:

We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners

With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:

Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,

Planted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.

Absolutely breath-taking lines.  The reference to exiles is twofold at least.  Not only are they exiles because they are contemplatives in a world that is hardly contemplative—or perhaps even anti contemplative—they are exiles from their true home of heaven where the first parents were cast out to be exiles.  They (and we) are the “poor banished children of Eve,” but now “sentinels” on the “frontier” waiting for Christ to come and conquer death.  That moment of anticipation has now come, as we see in the ninth section.

 

But in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos

Flying the prosperous world

Appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails,

Then, like the wise, wild baby,

The unborn John who could not see a thing

We wake and know the Virgin Presence

Receive her Christ into our night

With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.

Perhaps that is the poem’s climax; “We wake and know the Virgin Presence/Receive her Christ into our night.”  The statement is not just referring to the contemporaneous moment for St. John in the womb, but for all of us when every moment we realize and contemplate the incarnation, when in prayer the Blessed Mother visits us to bring Christ to us.

Finally in the tenth section we have a denouement.

Cooled in the flame of God’s dark fire

Washed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame

We burn like eagles…

Purified in fire and water presumably from contemplation, we now become like eagles, a symbol of transformed strength. 

 

…in His invincible awareness

And bound and bounce with happiness,

Leap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,

Our contemplation, our anticipated heaven

Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.

We too in Christ’s awareness leap with joy at our now knowledge of our anticipated return to “home.” 

What a brilliant poem.  I have to admit I laughed out loud to this line in section seven: “Your ecstasy is your apostolate,/For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.”  As a Lay Dominican, I particularly understand the reference.  One of the Dominican Order’s mottos is Contemplata aliis trader, which translates into English as "to hand down to others the fruits of contemplation."  A Dominican is not supposed to just contemplate, but the fruits of that contemplation are supposed to be passed on to others.  So Merton refers to St. John’s kick in the womb as a passing on the fruit of the fetus’s contemplation.  I thought that was funny.

Finally John Michael Talbot turned that extraordinary eighth section into a song, “We Are the Exiles.” 

 

John Michael must have found that passage breathtaking as well.  It's a beautiful song but he did take some liberties with the lyrics to fit it better into song form.  I did find this blog post by an unfamiliar blog called Peaceable Wisdom where he posted the lyrics as sung as sung by JMT.  If you’re interested in the lyrics, you can check it out.

 

Poetry: Part III of T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday

In the past I have posted Part I and Part II of T.S. Eliot’s magnificent poem Ash Wednesday.  You can read the entire poem here.    

Today is Ash Wednesday, a day of penance, fasting, and meditation on one’s sins and mortality and the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell.  

Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday really captures this well.  The poem is comprised of six parts, and I’ve already gone through the first two.  Each year I’ll give you another part to meditate on on this solemn day.  Here is Part III.

 

III

 

At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister

Under the vapour in the fetid air

Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

 

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below;

There were no more faces and the stair was dark,

Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond repair,

Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

 

At the first turning of the third stair

Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit

And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene

The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green

Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,

Lilac and brown hair;

Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind

over the third stair,

Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair

Climbing the third stair.

 

 

Lord, I am not worthy

Lord, I am not worthy

 

              but speak the word only.

In Part III the narrator is climbing a spiral staircase and at each of the first three turns he looks down.  Is the climbing of the stairwell an allusion to a journey through life to salvation?  Or is it a journey through Purgatory as a purgative journey to heaven?  Or something else?  I don’t really know.  My intuition leads me to think he is climbing the Purgatorial Mountain akin to Dante’s Purgatorio in the Divine Comedy.  Dante Purgatorial Mountain requires also spiral climb.  But there are no devils in Purgatory, neither in Dante’s Purgatory or in the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory.  Could Eliot have been mistaken or is he suggesting one of the other possibilities?

Nonetheless, go the Church and receive your ashes.  Make time to go before the Blessed Sacrament and meditate on your life and death and your journey hopefully to God.