Remember, O Man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return

And He said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live 
And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest... Ezekiel 37:3

Note: [click for larger image] as always, the details in Dore are astonishing: the skeleton on the left pushing the coffin up, the incarnating forms as the eye travels up to Ezekiel, the riveting skeleton on the right with arms raised, seeming not to be agonizing with incarnation but rejoicing in it, one imagines the skull at lower center to start rising out of the ground, bones gathering together underneath.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot has shaped my development perhaps more than any other. I remember being a sophomore in high school, studying in the library, a friend throwing down a copy of The Waste Land upon the table with frustration, saying that it would take a genius to understand it. Why, I asked. It's just really difficult, they replied, significantly adding, everyone knows it means something, but Eliot made it difficult to figure out what exactly that is. My friend continued, he even added footnotes because no one could figure it out. I was intrigued. I wondered why a poet would make something intentionally difficult. 

At the time, I knew of basically two types of poetry: Shakespeare and everything else. With Shakespeare, the difficulty - as I sophomorically conceived it - was in the language being dated, "old." To figure out Shakespeare's poetry, you just had to look all the strange words up in the dictionary, learn about Elizabethan customs. But he was not deliberately trying to be difficult or obscure. That was just the way people talked and wrote back then. (I had much to learn.) What other poetry I knew was mostly comprised of Poe, Frost and Dickinson.

Every high school sophomore would like to think themselves a genius, so I started in on The Waste Land. I quickly came to the realization that by this standard, I was no genius. Nevertheless, I determined myself to read it through to the end. I tried reading it out loud, under my breath, and this opened up the meter for me, being able to listen for hints of meaning. (I have never stopped this practice of reading poetry "out loud to myself.") Images and ideas piled on top of each other, like photographs in a drawer. By the time I reached the dialogue in the Game of Chess section, I could discern flashes of meaning beneath the surface. Enough to hook me. Enough to change my life. Not long after, I was deep into reading Weston's Ritual to Romance, Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and Jung's Man and His Symbols. The Waste Land started to make a great deal of sense to me. Took me a few years and a lot of hard work until I could say that I finally "understood" The Waste Land. So much for my genius. And I should add that it was about ten years later, sitting on a bench in Hyde Park in London, alone and in love with that city, that the poem surrendered completely, unforgettably, to me.

Of course, during my agonies with The Waste Land, I read the rest of Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men, Gerontion, Journey of the Magi, the masterpiece, The Four Quartets. Also Ash Wednesday.

The poem was written in 1927, his first work since his conversion Anglicism. Eliot stayed deep in the shadows of Dante all his life. And it is through the reflected radiance of the Commedia that you can best discern the momentous Purgatorial Turnings glowing between the lines of Ash Wednesday. This is a poem about conversion and redemption. Eliot is turning away from the old life, from the muted apostasies of Gerontion (1920):

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year

Came Christ the tiger

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

Among whispers

from the bleak quips of prediction in the Hollow Men (1925):

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

towards an authentic petition for redemption:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

into a genuine religious longing, "even among these rocks":

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will

In the Dantean cosmology, those who suffered in the Inferno had no hope of Purgatory. None but Dante and Virgil had ever traveled to the absolute nadir of that Hell and moved on, and up, into Purgatory. There are few inventions in the history of the written word that show greater audacity, of creative transgression, than Dante's recounting of this journey out of the Inferno. Dante created a Cosmos that verges upon being more substantial than our own. He mapped out the Christian World of the Soul. To this day, many understand the afterlife as according to Dante. To do this, he allowed himself, as the living author to transgress Divine Law. Dante wrote himself a way out of Hell. It's beautful. One of the first on a series of literary coup de graces to God.

Dante's intention was to set up a moral allegory: that the "lost souls" of the living still have hope. Turn your life around. Release yourself from the bindings of sin and begin the Purgatorial ascent up to the Divine.

Here is Eliot on the matter:

Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot

I

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is

nothing again

Because I know that time is always time

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 and

I renounce the blessèd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

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

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live? shall these

Bones live? And that which had been contained

In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

Because of the goodness of this Lady

And because of her loveliness, and because

She honours the Virgin in meditation,

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

It is this which recovers

My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions

Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn

In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.

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

Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only

The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping

With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

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

Is now the Garden

Where all loves end

Terminate torment

Of love unsatisfied

The greater torment

Of love satisfied

End of the endless

Journey to no end

Conclusion of all that

Is inconclusible

Speech without word and

Word of no speech

Grace to the Mother

For the Garden

Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity

Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

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 deceitul 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 driveling, 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.

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

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.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

And the weak spirit quickens to rebel

For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell

Quickens to recover

The cry of quail and the whirling plover

And the blind eye creates

The empty forms between the ivory gates

And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth

The place of solitude where three dreams cross

Between blue rocks

But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away

Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.