How to Read Ash Wednesday by Eliot
“Ash Wednesday” is a poem by T. S. Eliot, first published in 1930. Listen to the author reading his own poem:
Dr. Bartel helps us understand this complex work:
“Ash Wednesday” is a long poem written by T. S. Eliot during his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
Sometimes referred to as Eliot’s “conversion poem,” Ash Wednesday, with a base of Dante’s Purgatorio, is richly but ambiguously allusive and deals with the move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates his conversion.
The poem received mixed reactions from the public, some of whom were shocked by Eliot’s conversion to Christianity.
The poem’s title comes from the Christian fast day marking the beginning of Lent, forty days before Easter. It is a poem about the difficulty of religious belief, and concerned with personal salvation in an age of uncertainty. In “Ash Wednesday” Eliot’s poetic persona, one who has lacked faith in the past, has somehow found the courage, through spiritual exhaustion, to seek faith.
In the first section, Eliot introduces the idea of renunciation with a quote from Cavalcanti, in which the poet expresses his devotion to his lady as death approaches. Dante Gabriel Rossetti translated it under the title Ballata, Written in Exile at Sarzana, and rendered the first line as “Because I do not hope to return”. The idea of exile is thus also introduced.
Publication information
The poem was first published as now known in April, 1930 as a small book limited to 600 numbered and signed copies. Later that month an ordinary run of 2000 copies was published in the UK, and in September another 2000 copies were published in the US.
Eliot is known to have collected poems and fragments of poems to produce new works. This is most clearly seen in his poems “The Hollow Men” and “Ash Wednesday” where he incorporated previously published poems to become sections of a larger work. Three of the five sections comprising “Ash Wednesday” had already been published earlier as separate poems:
- “Perch’ Io non Spero” (part I of “Ash Wednesday”) was published in the Spring, 1928 issue of Commerce along with a French translation.
- “Salutation” (now part II of “Ash Wednesday”) was published in December, 1927 in Saturday Review of Literature. It was also published in January, 1928 in Eliot’s own Criterion magazine.
- “Som de l’escalina” (part III of “Ash Wednesday”) was published in the Autumn, 1929 issue of Commerce along with a French translation.
Dedication
When first published, the poem bore the dedication “To my wife”, referring to Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, with whom he had a strained relationship, and from whom he initiated a legal separation in 1933. The dedication did not appear in subsequent editions.
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The written text of “Ash Wednesday” is not yet in the public domain, but you can read it online, or in a published collection of Eliot’s poetry, such as this one pictured below.
Learn more about T. S. Eliot and his poetry here on our site.
