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.