Ash-Wednesday

by T. S. Eliot

Downloads: Under 100
Pages: 16

Read PDF online Download Save

About this book

Renunciation gives T. S. Eliot's six-part poem its opening rhythm, with repeated phrases that question desire, lost powers and the possibility of hope. In Ash-Wednesday, prayer becomes part of a struggle to accept limits and seek mercy. Dry air, desert stones and a twisting stair give that struggle a succession of physical settings, while a lady and a veiled sister appear among its appeals for help.

The verse repeatedly sets silence beside speech and memory beside forgetting. Bones beneath a juniper tree give way to gardens, fountains, birdsong and sails seen from a window. Returning words about time and hope take on different shades of meaning as the sequence develops. Readers drawn to religious verse can attend to these changing images and patterns of repetition, following a speaker caught between affection for the visible world and the wish to surrender personal will.

About the author

T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was an American-born British poet, critic, and playwright who became the defining voice of literary modernism. Works such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets reshaped English poetry, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.