day 11: Ash-Wednesday, by T.S. Eliot

Would you believe that I had this (the first section of "Ash-Wednesday") memorized at one point? I did. Ironically, despite the fact that I have read this poem aloud more times than probably any other poem I will record this month, I had a terrible time recording it tonight. I kept stumbling over the words. This was take 5, I think.

T.S. Eliot. My first poetry love. He is why Thia and I first started joking about having dead poetry boyfriends our freshman year at EMU. I remember the first time I read "The Waste Land" - I must have been 14 or 15, and I don't think I understood more than a few lines (there are 432 lines, FYI), but it was this sort of otherworldly, beautiful thing...

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. 

..."You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
-Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.  

..."You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?..." 

...After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience  

...Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?  

...My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries... 

-excerpts from "The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot

I'm intrigued by the wikipedia entry for "Ash-Wednesday":

Ash-Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. Eliot's style of writing in Ash-Wednesday showed a marked shift from the poetry he had written prior to his 1927 conversion, and his post-conversion style would continue in a similar vein. His style was to become less ironic, and the poems would no longer be populated by multiple characters in dialogue. His subject matter would also become more focused on Eliot's spiritual concerns and his Christian faith. 

Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about Ash-Wednesday. Edwin Muir maintained that it is one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular literati.

The lines from "Ash-Wednesday" that get thrown about in my group of friends is "teach us to care and not to care/teach us to sit still." I will leave you with that as a little thing to ponder on this rainy Friday night.