Ash-Wednesday

The subtractive test bites less than one would expect from a poem some of whose parts were first published apart. The repetitions that look like padding are the argument: “Because I do not hope to turn again” (I), turned over line after line, is a will that cannot will its turn, circling. The third section cannot be cut, nor the fourth, nor the close of the sixth, which answers the first. What can be questioned is the second: the leopards and the singing bones are among the best things in the poem, but the section first stood alone, and its place in the argument is made by assembly as much as by necessity. And the fifth section’s long run on the word goes on a few lines past its point. Idle nowhere; compelled not in every stretch.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: conversion is not an act of the will but the end of willing; a man cannot turn himself; and the honest state on the threshold of belief is neither hope nor despair but a discipline of not hoping. “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still” (I, VI) is as exact a statement of that condition as English poetry has, and it is true of more than the religious case: of grief, of renunciation, of any attachment that must be kept and released at once. The disclosure is articulate, not a mood. Held below the top band by its range: it is one inward state, finely mapped, and the poem does not set it against the social world.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation is high and frequent for a poem of this length. “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree / In the cool of the day” (II) opens the second section on a strange, cold grandeur, and the bones’ litany to the Lady rises into a chant. The stair of the third section, with the fiend twisted on the banister and then, through a window, the pastoral of “Lilac and brown hair” (III), is one of the great passages of temptation in the language, lifted by its own sensuousness. The sixth reaches a transport in “the lost lilac and the lost sea voices” (VI) that the poem then refuses, and lands on prayer with real height. Held below 9.0 because the fifth section, and stretches of the first, argue by incantation rather than ascend.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The archetypal structure is built, not evoked. The purgatorial ascent is the poem’s frame: the turning, the dismembering, the stair climbed past the devil and the garden, the word sought, the return to the sea. The Lady is made across the second, fourth and sixth sections as Beatrice, Mary and “spirit of the river, spirit of the sea” (VI) at once, and she carries the poem from the bones’ praise to the final petition. Ezekiel’s valley of bones is not decoration: the speaker’s dissolution is the condition of the word. The particular stays particular: brown hair, a broadbacked figure, a slotted window, granite shores. Held below the top band because the myth is borrowed whole from Dante and the liturgy and leant on more than remade: the poem is the climb, not a new myth of it.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The turn is real and it cost. The poet of The Waste Land, three years after his reception into the Church of England, put the modernist method, allusive collage, the dissolving speaker, the line stripped of its stops, to the service of devotion and liturgy, and wrote openly as a penitent when the advanced literary world of 1930 read such a turn as retreat. Many received the poem as a defection, and the stake was his standing with that world. Against that, the tradition he turned toward is old, and he takes its forms almost whole: Dante’s stair, the litany, the Ave Maria, Cavalcanti’s ballata, Herbert and Andrewes behind the voice. The departure lies in joining the two, not in a new form.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the poem stops knowing what it knows. The sentence that starts again and again on “Because”, the dropped punctuation that lets each phrase hang without completion, the liturgical responses set into the line: these are the condition of a will that cannot close its own act. The third section is three stairs because the climb is in three stages, and the window on the May time is placed where the ascent falters. In the sixth, “Although I do not hope to turn again” (VI) answers the first line of the poem, and the whole movement is carried by one changed word. Held from the top because the six-part frame is the shape of an assembly as well as of an argument, and the fifth section’s wordplay is a form of thought the poem only half believes in.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence across ninety-six years of reading, and the poem is not closed. The Lady’s identity, the meaning of the leopards and the juniper, whether the veiled sister of the fourth and fifth sections is one figure: these remain open. The poem has been read in turn as a narrative of conversion, as a poem of a marriage ending, as a liturgical poem for the day it is named for, and as the hinge between The Waste Land and Four Quartets, and no reading has displaced the others. Formal depth repays return as well, in the sound of the third and sixth sections. Held below the top band because much of the yield has come from sources traced rather than from meaning still unfolding: the criticism of its sources has been more exhaustive than the poem.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is poetry in English in the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the poem showed that the modernist instruments could carry belief without irony, made a devotional modernism possible, and is the first statement of the late manner that Four Quartets completes. Held well below its author’s major work because most of what it opened was realised in Four Quartets, which carries the reach, and because it did not redirect the field as The Waste Land did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it shaped the religious and meditative poetry in English of the decades after it, and its lines have entered general use, “Teach us to care and not to care” (I) above all, quoted of grief and love far outside the church.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Ninety-six years since publication, in the span of seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole and settled, and it has stood in every collected Eliot since 1936. Presence is wide and continuous: it is taught, anthologised, the first and third sections above all, translated widely, and read in churches on the day it is named for. Nothing in it is fixed to its moment: no topical surface and no period furniture beyond the liturgy, which is older than the poem. It stops at the usual figure for its span because its presence is wide but not the widest: it is read less than The Waste Land, and much of its reading lies within the academy and the church.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Eliot’s English. The making is load-bearing and at a high command. The music of the third section, the long rising line of the fourth, and the sound of the sixth, “the lost heart stiffens and rejoices / In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices” (VI), are among the finest verse sound of the century; the play of free line against rhyme in the first, the long opening line set against the short rhymed lines that follow, is exact. The liturgical insets are joined without a seam. Charged: the fifth section’s play on word, Word and world is mechanical in places; some of the fourth section’s imagery tilts toward the ornamental; and “Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?” (I) was read in 1930 as self-parody and is hard to hear otherwise still.

Score: 9.0 / 10

One law governs the whole: the turning, refused, attempted, and given. Take the two most distant elements: the surreal bones of the second section, content to be scattered under the juniper, and the plain petition of the sixth among the granite and the sea. They obey one law: both are the self giving up its will, the first in dissolution, the last in prayer. The tonal range is wide for so short a poem, from the dry penance of the first section through the sensuous memory of the third and fourth to the incantation of the fifth, and the law holds across it. Charged: the seam of the assembly is still faintly audible between the second section and the third, where the register changes more than the argument requires.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged at the scale of a poem of a little over two hundred lines, and the mark describes the form. What it holds: consciousness at its most inward; the sacred in its liturgical form; erotic love remembered and renounced; the natural order, as sea, garden, desert and birds; the church as a body of words and rites; and something of the world’s loss of faith, “the vanished power of the usual reign” (I). It holds these as one. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the absence of the social and the historical: there is no family on the page, no labour, no state, and no city as The Waste Land had one. An inward sequence holds a narrow world deeply, and no more.

Score: 7.3 / 10