აღსავალისა და კიბის მოტივი ტ.ს.ელიოტის „ნაცრისყრის ოთხშაბათში“

Abstract

T.S.Eliot's Ash Wednesday is often called his conversion poem. It represents a particular search for "self-transcendence," what Eliot early in his career called "an all-inclusive experience outside of which nothing shall fall." The protagonist of the poem almost fails in his search for the transcendent, but not entirely. It is cyclical in its form, moving from a sense of despair and choice of renunciation in death, to a vision of one's sin, to a vision of something heavenly and eternal, back to a sense of this world and its sensual claims and struggles. Still it ends with hope in prayer. The poem is a study in the struggle between the worlds of time and that of the eternal, between the worlds of faith and evidence, and between self-sufficiency and repentance. It invokes a number of themes and images from Dante's final cantos of the Purgatorio, which address Dante's repentance and cleansing in Eden before Beatrice. Eliot's Lady is alternately Lady Poverty or Renunciation, Death, the Virgin Mary, or (perhaps) a woman like Beatrice. Eliot's later developed neo-Platonic themes are already in evidence here, esp. the notion that the eternal and transcendent somehow exist beyond our sense of history and the contingent in this life.