- Hello, I'm Victor Strandberg.

Concluding our studies in

the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

In this session, we're going

to look at Ash Wednesday,

Eliot's first major poem,

after his conversion.

Ash Wednesday, in the Christian calendar

is a day of repentance and humility.

And for T.S. Eliot, humility

was a supreme virtue,

necessary to become a Christian.

He said in one of his

essays, on Shakespeare,

that humility is the hardest virtue

to achieve.

Nothing dies harder than the desire

to think well of oneself.

On the other hand, he also said,

in Four Quartets, much later,

that humility is the only wisdom.

And it was his final answer

to the crisis to believe.

Now by the same token,

pride, the 7th and deadliest sin

in the medieval tradition,

was T.S. Eliot's particular obstacle,

to the Christian conversion.

In order to become a Christian,

Eliot in particular, had to renounce

three forms of pride.

The first that I would

cite is pride of intellect.

Which is to say that Eliot,

because of his intellect,

his studies in modern science,

in secular thinking,

in the naturalistic philosophy of life,

because of all that he

ended up as a hollow man

living in The wastelands.

He would have to renounce his intellect

in order to become a Christian.

I'm going to come back to that in a moment

but let's move to the second mode of pride

that he would have to renounce

to become a Christian.

This would be social pride.

During The wasteland

period, Eliot had taken

conciliation from his superiority

to the low-class rabble that show up

in his poems.

The Sweeney's, the Bleistein's,

the Rachel Rabinovitch's,

the Poles and Greeks, and other such.

Eliot of course knew that

this was a false value

and giving up that form of pride

would not be too difficult, although

living in England, T.S.

Eliot did, I think,

retain some satisfaction about his place

in the social hierarchy.

Perhaps it was a little too much

to ask him to extirpate all

of his sense of social superiority.

But we'll have to say that he tried,

that he never treated his social inferiors

with the contempt that he had shown

during the earlier phase of his

life and poetry.

In fact, he tried to make amends

to Sweeney, in particular,

by writing a sort of

tragic take on Sweeney.

He called it Sweeney Agonistes.

Sort of like Milton's poem and

though this play was not,

in the end, completed,

nonetheless he did try

to turn a Christian eye

to the object of previous

contempt, Sweeney.

The third and most difficult form of pride

for T.S. Eliot to overcome

was his pride as an artist.

That was the one real conciliation

through The Wasteland period,

to be the king of poetry, the acknowledged

leader of the poetic revolution

of the 20th century in English

and to be honored and celebrated

around the world for

his poetic achievements.

He would have to renounce that too,

to become a Christian.

Now I want to come back for a moment

to Eliot's pride of intellect.

The first of these three forms of pride

that I cited as something he would

have to renounce.

In our Western civilization,

we think of the mind as semi-autonomous,

it goes wherever it pleases,

we cannot really have full

control of our thinking.

There's something involuntary

about the way the mind

moves from one thought

to another, from one subject to another,

one memory to another perhaps.

And there's nothing we can do about it.

Here I think, T.S. Eliot's

studies in Buddhism

come into play.

If we remember The Fire Sermon, the Buddha

advised his monks to

renounce the physical body,

the five senses are on

fire, and to renounce

the mind, which is also on fire.

If they could do that, suppress both

the body and the mind,

then they would have access

to the deepest, truest eternal self,

the Atman, which thereupon would be free

from the wheel of

rebirth and it could join

permanently the universal

soul which Hindu's call

the Brahman, that is B-R-A-H-M-A-N,

the eternal soul that

pervades all of reality

and that goes on forever.

In Buddhism, one would lose

ones conscious identity,

one's separate self in

joining that universal soul.

But the separate self,

the conscious identity

was a burden and even a sin.

And so, we might say, to escape all that

into nirvana, was the greatest blessing

in the Buddhist view of life.

Now Eliot turned away

from these metaphysical

features of Buddhism,

nirvana, the universal soul,

which the Atman joins at

the time of ones death,

but he did retain the

Buddhist set of ethics.

He overcame the fires of the body when he

was baptized and at the same time,

took a vow of celibacy.

That's an odd thing for

a married man perhaps,

certainly nothing neither the Christian

or Hebrew tradition would require that,

but I think it was, you might say,

that Buddhist heritage he turned to,

to overcome his body and I

think in the same fashion,

he overcame his mind, disciplined the mind

through something akin

to the way the Buddhist

holy man or Hindu holy man concentrates,

closes out the world around

him, fastens exclusively

on access to the eternal,

to the Atman,

to that part of himself

which may be obscured

by the body and the mind

if we cannot discard

those distractions.

Eliot's form, I think, or

his parallel to this Buddhist

function of spiritual

discipline was his way

of worship in the Anglican church.

Which is to say he was

extremely punctilious.

One of his practices

when he taught at Harvard

in the early 1930's for a year or two,

was that he would show up every morning

at the Anglican chapel near Harvard

and an acolyte, a student at Harvard

who served with the Priest

in that Anglican church

remarked that every morning, early,

Eliot would show up, frequently

as the only parishioner

to take part in the Anglican Eucharist

which our Catholic's call the Mass,

and would always be extremely careful

to observe the form of worship exactly,

smiting his breast at

exactly the same time,

falling on his knees at

exactly the right point

in the liturgy and so forth.

And so I think he was able to, in the end,

discipline his intellect sufficiently

so that he could cast aside the powers

of the mind that had led him

into The Wasteland that had overridden his

religious desires in poems

like, The Hollow Man,

The Wasteland, and Gerontion.

I want to turn to the

poem proper at this point

and we'll take up section one.

This section of Ash Wednesday

recounts T.S. Eliot's

psychological or spiritual death

so that he could become

a new man as a Christian.

This is a section where

he renounces his pride

as an artist.

The master metaphor of Ash Wednesday

is of a man toiling up a spiral staircase,

perhaps going up a tower,

maybe even a church steeple.

Now the spiral is quite

different from a wheel.

When a wheel turns, we come

back to where we started,

meaningless repetitions.
In a spiral, you begin at point A

and you end up quite

differently at point B.

And so as he turned to

the Christian faith,

this metaphor changes from the wheel

to the spiral staircase to show a sense

of spiritual progress being possible.

"Because I do not hope to turn again",

means that he will not go down

the spiral staircase.

He will never go back to The Wasteland

point of view, that spiritual desert.

"Because I do not hope," presumably hope

is too fragile a thing.

That he has to get beyond

both hope and despair

as he says later in this

poem, in order to toil

up the staircase.

What he really needs is faith

and he seems to have found that

to keep him moving up

that spiral direction.

Now it's interesting,

"Because I do not hope

to turn desiring this mans gift

and that man's scope."

That's a fascinating
excerpt from Shakespeare.

In one of his sonnet's, Shakespeare

the greatest master of

language who ever lived,

expressed this envy of other artists,

"desiring this man's gift

and that man's scope."

and T.S. Eliot now

renounces that artistic envy

that even Shakespeare exhibited.

"I no longer strive to

strive towards such things."

He's given up his status as an artist.

But notice in parenthesis

this marvelous little

backlash, he can't help himself.

In parenthesis,

"(Why should the aged

eagle stretch its wings?)"

Noe by calling himself the

eagle of modern poetry,

the king of birds, it's

quite clear that he has not

quite suffocated his pride

as an artist after all.

"Why should the aged

eagle stretch its wings?"

Everyone knows what I can do.

I've shown my stuff, I don't have to strut

my talent anymore.

There is that kind of

an undertone even while

he's struggling to achieve humility

as an artist.

We proceed with a similar

sort of a backlash

in the next two lines.

"Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?"

The reign, he was the King of poetry,

make no mistake about it.

He wants everyone to know that he

abdicated the throne voluntarily.

He didn't have to do it

and he can even abdicate the throne

with a sort of dismissal

of its importance.

"The vanished power of the usual reign."

It was not big deal

being the King of poetry.

The second stanza of part one

I think takes us into

the garden of the muses.

"Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour,"

that was the one source of strength,

of value, of spiritual achievement

back in his Wasteland period.

"The infirm glory of the positive hour,"

is when his creativity was at full sail.

"Because I do not think,"

and indeed he doesn't have to renounce

his intellect in order to give up his role

as an artist and of course,

simply in order to become

a Christian believer.

"Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power,"

that is the power of artistic creativity

which he is renouncing.

"Because I cannot drink

There, where trees

flower, and springs flow,"

that's the garden of the muses,

which he is now departing.

As we move on, certain themes

that held such tremendous

importance in the past

now lose their importance.

One of them is the quest

for the meaning of time.

"There will be time, there will be time",

back in Prufrock's case, "hurry up please,

it's time", in The Wasteland.

Now as a Christian,

time is reduced
under the perspective of eternity.

"Because I know that time is always time",

merely time as a man now who

rejects his own intellectual

quest of the past,

he can accept his

limitations in not knowing

the meaning of time, it doesn't matter.

"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."

That's an astonishing

statement for the author

of The Wasteland.

As you remember, Tiresias

in The Fire Sermon,

"By the waters of Leman

I sat down and wept,"

he certainly didn't rejoice back then

and he's still living

in The Wasteland here,

in Ash Wednesday, in the natural world,

but now he can rejoice

that things are as they are

because it is all subordinated

to his Christian faith.

"I renounce the blessed face" he says,

and renounce the voice."

Now I think what most makes sense here

would be the voice and

the face of the muses

that would be the context of the rest

of part one.

"Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice,

having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice."

We go on with a prayer asking forgiveness,

I think for his past poetry.

Poetry that served as sort

of a Pied Piperous role

leading other people into The Wasteland.

But notice how as he

prays for forgiveness,

he cannot resist using the Royal, we.

When Queen Elizabeth heard a bad joke,

excuse me I meant to say Queen Victoria,

when Queen Victoria heard a bad joke

she would say, we are not amused.

And so here, Eliot prays.

"And pray to God to have mercy upon us"

and he prays for strength

to stop thinking.

"And pray that I may forget

These matters that with

myself I too much discuss."

So the Buddhist discipline helps

in suppressing his mind, but he also needs

to offer a Christian prayer

for additional strength

to achieve that purpose.

"Because I do not hope to turn again,"

this is a permanent conversion,

I'm not going back.

"Let these words answer,"

in Ash Wednesday.

"For what is done, not to be done again,"

I will not write that

kind of blasphemous poetry

in the future.

"May the judgment not

be too heavy upon us."

We go back now to the earlier image

of Eliot as the King of

poetry and as the eagle,

the aged eagle no longer

having to stretch its wings.

Now at the end of part one.

"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

Teach us to care and not to care."

Now that line I think is

the second contribution

of Buddhism to this poem.

The first being that Buddhist discipline

to suppress both the mind and the body

in order to become, not a

Buddhist, but a Christian

in Eliot's case.

And here "teach us to

care and not to care"

is a Christian version of

the Buddhist middle way.

The idea I think here as in Buddhism

is that, if we do not care at all

about the world's

sufferings, that is a sin.

We think back to people like the young man

assaulting the typist

in The Fire Sermon.

We think of Sweeney exploiting the woman

in Sweeney Among the Nightingales.

There are other Sweeney

poems where that takes place.

We think of the young man, perhaps even

abandoning the woman

in Portrait of a Lady.

These men did not care at all

and that is a sin.

On the other hand, it is also a sin

to care too much.

To care too much leads to despair,

to disbelieve, to the

anguish of Gerontion,

" I have no ghosts," to

the anguish of Tiresias,

"By the waters of Leman I sat and wept,"

and more obviously to the

amorosity of T.S. Eliot himself.

So this then is a

beautifully crafted response

to the sufferings of the world.

There's nothing by way of

poetic pyrotechnics here.

There's no flashy images,

no particular notable

sound effect, though

certainly Ash Wednesday

is full of beautiful sound effects,

internal rhymes and the like.

Nonetheless, descended to strip down

to its absolute essence, "teach us to care

and not to care."

That's what it means to be a Christian.

"Teach us to sit still."

The end then for supplication on behalf

of us sinners "now and at

the hour of our death."

Going to part two.

Here, T.S. Eliot sets his

physical annihilation.

In part one he was a

psychological or spiritual

annihilation as an artist.

He would have to give up on that

and assume a new identity altogether

as a Christian artist with people saying,

this is all folly, he accepted all that.

His physical annihilation's

all so easy to accept.

We're begin, I think

with a figure from Dante,

lady, three white leopards

sat under a juniper tree.

In Dante's, in his Divine Comedy,

the very first thing

that happens is Dante

awakens in the dark wood,

half way through his life and he sees

off into the distance, the

hill of salvation shining.

He runs, he sprints at full tilt towards

that hill of salvation.

When he gets to the

bottom, the path is blocked

by savage animals.

A leopard, a lion, and a wolf.

Those animals represent

Dante's propensity to sin.

And for that reason, he

cannot go up the hill

of salvation.

He has to go by another way, through hell

and purgatory before

he can climb that hill.

Now in Eliot's setting of part two,

the three white leopards

are in the cemetery.

The juniper tree is an

evergreen that is often found

in cemeteries, and these

animals have devoured

Eliot's physical body.

They "sat under the juniper

tree in the cool of the day

having fed having fed to satiety

On my legs, my heart,

my liver, and that which

had been contained in the

hollow round of my skull."

Now the reason why Eliot's

physical annihilation

does not matter is

because he has now found

a myth of rebirth.

Which to Eliot is alive

and vital and valid

and which he turns to as

the immediate next line.

"And God said shall these bones live?

Shall these bones live?"

This is a reference to the prophet Ezekiel

in the Hebrew Bible who had a vision

of a valley full of dry bones.

And as he watched, a voice said,

God's voice, "shall these bones live?"

And as Ezekiel watched,

the bones came together

as a full skeleton and

the skeletons put on flesh

and then they assumed life

and stood up, fully alive.

As we proceed in part two,

Eliot describes himself

as here dissembled upon

for hiding something but also

for being disassembled physically.

"I proffer my deeds to oblivion,"

again, having to contain through humility,

he feels that nothing he did in life

was really worthwhile.

" I proffer my deeds to oblivion,

and my love to the

posterity of the desert."

His love also was was

thought of imperfect.

Particularly now that he's a celibate man,

he can renounce sexual

love as something tainted

and unworthy back in The Wasteland.

"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."

Dealing I suppose with the agony he cited

at the beginning of The Wasteland.

"April is the cruelest month,

mixing memory and desire."

Here now he is free from

both in the graveyard.

"And God said prophesy to the wind,"

this is what he told

Ezekiel in the episode

I just mentioned.

"The bones sang chirping With the burden

of the grasshopper, saying,"

and here we proceed into

the most lyrical section.

A part to these very short lines,

giving us a long list

of Christian paradoxes.

Now another way to view these lines

is through the prism of that great lesson

of part one.

"Teach us to care and not to care."

Let us find the middle

way through resolving

these paradoxes, his listing of opposites.

He addresses then:

"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," capital R, that would be

the incarnation of Christ.

That's why we have rose windows

in the great cathedrals in Europe.

To celebrate the incarnation.

"The single Rose

Is now the Garden," capital G,

the garden of Christian faith.

"Where all loves end."

The end of the endless journey to no end."

That word end has a double meaning.

One meaning, of course,

is a final termination

of something.

But the other meaning

is a sense of purpose.

As in the phrase, means and ends.

In Four Quartets, a dozen

years in the future,

T.S. Eliot would use

that particular reference

to ends as a central basis of the poem.

"Hear then the Christian faith,

the Garden is the end of the otherwise

endless journey to no end."

We conclude part two, about

the physical annihilation

of T.S. Eliot with Eliot's bones

in the graveyard singing,

happy to be dead.

"Under a juniper-tree the bones sang,

scattered and shining, we

are glad to be scattered,

we did little good to each other,"

back when Eliot was alive.

"Under a tree in the cool of the day,

with the blessing of sand,

forgetting themselves and each other,

united in the quiet of the desert."

Eliot can't resist the pun,

on a cemetery lot in the next line.

"This is the land which

ye shall divide by lot.

This is the land.

We have our inheritance."

Being dead and being as it were, grateful

for the gift of death, you might say,

an escape from The

Wasteland to a better life,

shall these bones live.

The next two sections of Ash Wednesday

give us two kinds of mysticism.

That was a chapter in

William James' varieties

in religious experience

that Eliot has found

of greatest interest.

In Four Quartets, he cites

the Greek philosopher,

a little before the time of Socrates,

named Heraclitus who declared that

the way up and the way down are the same.

They come out in the same place.

In section three and

four of Ash Wednesday,

we have the way up, a

direct vision of glory

and the way down, through

the dark night of the soul.

They both come out in the same way.

It's typical of Eliot, who liked to be

comprehensive, to address

both forms of mysticism.

Here in part three we take the way down

through the dark night of the soul.

Now, the metaphor that

is basic to the poem

climbing a spiral staircase still holds

as we begin part three.

"At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

the devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitful face of

hope and of despair."

So he is toiling up the staircase

but he is going through darkness

at this phase of the journey.

And what happens next

as he reaches a landing,

At the first turning of the third stair

and this landing represents the temptation

to simply stay at this

part of The Wasteland,

we'll call it, which

represents the world's beauty.

As an artist, particularly

Eliot was susceptible

to beauty in all its forms.

And for many artists, this will suffice

as a way to live a successful,

perhaps even happy life.

To relish what the world

can offer by the way

of a transcendent

experience of its beauty.

Eliot himself had experienced this,

listening to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde

or in the episode with the Hyacinth girl.

"I could not speak, my eyes failed.

I was neither living nor dead

looking to the heart

of light, the silence,"

back then.

So, in this particular case, we have then,

a glimpse through a slotted window

of something beautiful out there.

"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 broad-backed 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."

We remember some of these images early on.

The enticements of the worlds beauty.

Now of course, Eliot's pilgrim has to keep

toiling up the staircase.

It cannot simply sit and

enjoy the world's beauty

as though this were the answer

to the crisis he believes.

Something similar as you remember in,

Journey of the Magi, "there

were times we regretted

the summer palaces on the slopes,

the silken girls bringing sherbet."

It would be so nice just

to sit back and enjoy this.

So Eliot calls all that a, "distraction,

music of the flute, stops

and steps of the mind

over the third stair, fading, fading;

strength beyond hope and despair."

I think that's his strength of faith.

"Climbing the third stair."

And with a close from the liturgy,

"Lord, I am not worthy,

Lord, I am not worthy,

but speak the word only."

And my soul shall be saved.

Which he doesn't say but he implies.

Section four gives us the way up.

A direct vision of Christ.

It's put in a form of

an interrogative format.

"Who walked between the

violet and the violet."

That image of the violet comes in

from time to time, the

typist at the "violet hour"

about ready to close up and go home.

It seems to be a particularly

mysterious moment

in the day in Eliot's treatments.

"Who walked between the

violet and the violets,

who walked between the

various ranks of varied green

Going in" blue and white,

excuse me, "white and

blue, in Mary's color."

People "Talking of trivial things

In ignorance and in

knowledge of eternal dolor,

Who moved among the others as they walked,

Who made strong the

fountains and made fresh

the springs?

The wastelands of lights made fertile.

Made cool to dry raw, made firm the sand,

sovegna vos."

That's a line from Dante's Purgatory,

and it's a line that means, remember us.

"Remember us sinners in purgatory

in your time on Earth, when you have time

to think and decide about

these sacred issues."

He's speaking now about his life

in the wasteland.

I think the point is, we have to live

on both levels, even after his conversion.

We do now have the spiritual dimension

of existence that did not exist back in

the wasteland period.

There is a metaphysical

answer to the burial

of the dead.

Eliot has climbed aboard

that raft of salvation

and enjoys it immensely, but we also,

so long as we have physical life

on this Earth, must go on living on

a naturalistic level, too.

And I think that's what he's describing.

"Here, the years that

walk between, bearing

away the fiddles and the flutes."

And nonetheless, offering,

because of this new

perspective, a way to redeem the time,

time which was irredeemable.

It meant simply the approach

of old age and death

in the earlier period of

Eliot's naturalistic thinking.

Here, however, he speaks of,

the new year's walk,

restoring the years,

restoring with a new verse,

the ancient rhyme."

Certainly, with Eliot's new verse

dedicated to the propagation of the faith.

"Redeem the time, redeem the unread vision

in the higher dream."

I think that's the Christian faith.

"While jeweled unicorns drawing by

the guilded hearse."

In my view, the gilded hearse is Eliot's

previous poetry, and

here, even though he's

struggling to retain

humility as an artist,

he can't help but note that by golly,

that hearse really was quite an excellent

bit of craftmanship, a gilded hearse

being drawn by jeweled unicorns.

A pretty nice spectacle

even as it's drawn offstage.

We turn now to the lady, the intercessor,

a figure that probably, amongst others,

represents Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The intercessor, will the "silent sister

veiled in white and blue,"

that's Mary's color,

will she pray for us is

the essential question.

And as we are now part four, a last view

of this vision of glory,

"the fountains sprang

up, the birds sang down,

redeem the time, redeem the time.

The token of the word unheard and unspoken

till the wind shake a thousand whispers

from the yew."

The yew tree is another evergreen,

it suggests the cemetery, but now

with a sense of immortality attached

to this landscape.

The last line of part four, the way up.

"And after this our exile."

which is to say, the mystic vision

eventually comes to an end,

and we have to return to ordinary reality,

our exile back to this ordinary world

of time and matter and nature.

A disappointing outcome,

but one we have to accept

so long as we live on physically.

Part five of Ash Wednesday is a prayer

through people who are still trapped in

the wasteland.

And here, Eliot refers to

his poetry with a small

w, the word.
Now, in this service of

the word, with a capital W,

the word of God and

indeed the word is God,

according to the gospel of Saint John.

The word was with God and the word

is God according to that gospel.

So, he has a play on that term, word,

as we begin part five.

"If the lost word is lost,"

small w is this poetry.

"If the spent word is spent," and I think

that's his earlier poetry, which is lost

and spent as far as he's concerned.

Still is the unspoken word, the poetry

that he has yet to write

for the Christian faith.

And the Word unheard, the capital W,

the word of God, which is

unheard by too many people

and it's up to him now to amend that.

"And the light shone in darkness

and against the Word," capital W,

"the unstilled world still whirled."

The turn of the wheel of time,

the turning world, to no purpose

except thought he Christian faith.

And here, the Christian faith is described

as what's at the center of the wheel,

the still point at the

center of the turning world.

So, "the unstilled world still whirled

about the center of the silent word."

The silent word of course being a reproach

to the poet who now

needs to use his talents

for this new purpose.

We have a lament then on Eliot's part

over the damage he's done to people

through his earlier poetry.

"Oh my people, what

have I done unto thee?"

Here again, the struggle for humility

seems to be a bit difficult, Eliot as

though he has the voice

of a great prophet here,

the leader of the people spiritually,

which in a number of ways, he was,

but it seems a little bit out of tune

in this effort to be humble.

"Where shall the word be found,

where will the world resound," et cetera.

And we move on then to the empathy

for people still trapped

in a wasteland mentality,

and a supplication to this lady

to intervene for them.

"Will the veil sister pray for those

who walk in darkness, those who chose

thee and oppose thee, those are torn

on the horn between season and season,

between hour and hour, those who

wait in darkness?

Will the veil sister pray

for children at the gate

who will not go away and cannot pray?"

That's sort of like

Eliot in The Hollow Man,

lips that would form prayers,

but they are prayer to hollow stone.

"Oh my people, what have I

done to thee" once again.

The prophet lamenting his false prophecies

in the past.

"Will the veil sister between the slender

yew trees pray for those who offend her?"

And now terrified and cannot surrender,

cannot follow Eliot's path into the church

of England in his case,

or into some branch

of the Christian communion.

"In the last desert between

the last blue rocks,"

and the rocks are always

a motif indicating

the wasteland.

"The desert in the garden,

the garden in the desert."

There's the motif that

represents life on both levels.

As a Christian, we may enjoy a garden

in the naturalistic

desert, which on one level

we have to continue as our

environment for living.

But we do have a garden in that desert,

which it did not exist previously.

On the other hand, even as Christians

living in the garden

sometimes there is a desert

in the garden, a time of despair,

a time, perhaps, even of unbelief, a time

of suffering, and we have

to simply try to live

on both levels again, in both a garden

and the desert.

Turning now to the last

section of Ash Wednesday,

section six, the theme here, I think,

is that of Eliot's posture

of waiting for the end.

He changes the conjunction

at the beginning

of part six quite conspicuously.

He's starting with, "because

I shall not turn again,"

that is, this is a permanent conversion.

Now he says, "although I do not hope

to turn again, although

I do not hope to turn."

Now, I think the purpose

of that conjunction here

is to indicate that he will not go back

down that staircase to a

naturalistic view of life,

but he does have another temptation,

which he has to struggle against.

And that temptation is to get out

of the wasteland now,

I don't want to go on

living all the years that I must in this

sense of duality, of living both

in the wasteland physically, and

on this other level spiritually.

So he goes on and describes this life

in the wasteland, which

on one level continues,

wavering between the prophet and the lost,

yes that false value still matters

on this level of existence.

"In this brief transit

where the dreams crossed."

I think the dreams would

represent the dimensions

of time, past, present, and the future,

which are dreamlike, given that no one

has ever defined time successfully,

not scientist, no theologian.

All we know is that it is dreamlike.

He speaks then of "the

dreamcrossed twilight

between Earth and dying."

That's our life in this

natural life world.

Now, his imagery of escape from it,

I think comes in two uses of metaphor,

"bless me, father,

though I do not wish

to wish these things."

He cannot maintain total mental discipline

as a Christian, and so

he has the image here

of a ship leaving the wasteland.

"From the wide window toward

the granite shore, the white

sails still fly seaward."

Seaward flying, he would sort of like

to go with that ship.

The next image inbroken wings is of a bird

flying away, and he would rather like to

get out of this environment now.

"The lost heart stiffens and rejoices

in the lost lilac and

the lost sea voyages.

The weak spirit quickens to rebel."

He goes on now further describing life

in the wasteland on this level that he has

to go on experiencing.

This is the time of tension between dying

and birth.

Well, yes, between

dying as he grows older,

and the new birth that

he's looking forward to.

This is the place of solitude, solitude,

there is still the sense of loneliness.

Now, he overcame his

loneliness very largely

by joining the Christian communion,

that vast organization,

we could call it,

though it's more than that.

That vast network or web of believers,

which he could now feel solidarity with.

Even so, in the natural world perhaps,

there remains an experience of solitude.

This place of solitude

where three dreams cross,

past, present, and the future,

between blue rocks, yes the

rocks are the wasteland.

"When the voice is shaken from the yew

tree drift away, let

the other yew be shaken

and reply."

And the other yew, I

think, would be the voices

from the next world, the voices bespeaking

immortality, maybe the same voices that

we saw or heard in The Hollow Man,

voices in the winds singing, more distant

and more solemn than a fading star.

I think those voices are more clear

and more real to him now.

"Blessed sister, holy mother,

spirit of the fountain,

spirit of the garden."

We sum up now, the

lessons of Ash Wednesday.

"Suffer us not to mock ourselves

with falsehood.

Teach us to care and not to care.

Teach us to sit still, to be accepting,

even among these rocks."

And that is living in the Wasteland.

"Our peace and his will."

Subordinating his own intellect,

his own appetites, his entire being

to His will, capital H.

"Sister, mother, spirit of the river,

spirit of the sea, suffer

me not to be separated,"
from God.

Perhaps separated in other respects also,

as he has joined the Christian Communion.

We conclude then with a notable prayer.

"Let my cry come unto Thee," Capital T.

Previously, this expression of religious

desire was suppressed.

When he thought of an "infinitely gentle,

infinitely suffering thing," he wiped away

with a scornful laugh and preludes.

Or in The Hollow Man, "this

is the way the world ends,

not with a bang, but a whimper."

A contemptuous description

of his own desire,

his supplication of a dead man's hand

"under the twinkle of the fading star."

Now he can openly and honestly

offer that same version

of religious desire

without any sense of embarrassment.

Let it stand as his last word in our study

of T.S. Eliot's poetry.

Now, to conclude, I have tried to

render a sort of bare bones analysis

of T.S. Eliot's poetry.

I think that if you follow the argument

thus far, that you do

understand T.S. Eliot

fundamentally.

There is of course a

great deal more to learn.

Many shelves of books have been written

about the term, naturalism.

Many shelves, likewise,

on the term modernism.

Many shelves about T.S. Eliot's multitude

of references to other

literature's from the past,

to his thinking in so many subtle ways.

And, I leave all that

to those in my listening

audience who may wish to pursue further

interest in T.S. Eliot.

Now, as I close, I will

mention one other enterprise

that I'm going to append to this work

I've been doing,

In a short time, a week or 10 days,

I'm going to render one

or two more lectures

on T.S. Eliot's literary

and cultural criticism,

which were also of great importance

to the literary culture of his own time,

and even now, passing on to our time.

We'll end our discussion there.