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.
