26 pages • 52 minutes read
T. S. EliotAsh Wednesday
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1930A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1915)
Eliot’s first published poem, this is a dramatic monologue spoken by a middle-aged man, Prufrock, who is acutely aware of the futility, pointlessness, and superficiality of his existence. He would like to change his life, to discover some meaning and purpose to it, but he is chronically indecisive and too timid to try for something better. He knows all this and speaks of himself in a self-deprecating way. Unlike the speaker in Ash Wednesday, he does not reach out to religion to cure his malaise. Many early readers were baffled by the poem but it soon became recognized as a significant Modernist work, reflecting the themes of alienation and purposelessness that were common in the poetry of the time.
“Little Gidding” by T. S. Eliot (1942)
This is the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets, and it can also be read as an individual poem. Like Ash Wednesday, it seeks to trace a path beyond the suffering of the world into a timeless reality in which “All shall be well / And all manner of thing shall be well.” Little Gidding is a village in England with a long history. Eliot visited the chapel there in the winter of 1936 and wrote the poem during World War II. The speaker contemplates England past and present, including the significance of the chapel and the community it served in the 17th century. The poem discusses time and change and how the past intersects with the present in a timeless moment. It also presents the possibility of purgation or purification by remembering the significance of the past.
“Marina” by T. S. Eliot (1930)
This poem was published in the same year as Ash Wednesday. It is notable for Eliot’s choice of an optimistic theme. Marina is a character from Shakespeare’s play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Marina is Pericles’s daughter. She was born at sea, became lost, and then was found again by her father. The poem symbolically expresses grace and hope.
Further Literary Resources
The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon (2022)
In this book, Gordon argues that Eliot had a female friend, Emily Hale, whom he loved and who inspired him in the same way that Beatrice inspired Dante. Eliot and Hale met in 1905, when Eliot was sixteen and Hale was fourteen. They did not meet again until seven or eight years later (another odd, rough parallel with Beatrice and Dante), at the home of Eliot’s cousin Eleanor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Eliot fell in love with her. Gordon claims that Hale was the “hyacinth girl” who appears in The Waste Land, arguing that the relevant scene (Lines 35-41) records a moment of transcendental love that Eliot experienced in Hale’s presence. Gordon also argues that Hale was not only the “hyacinth girl” but also the “Lady of silences” and of the “unread vision in the higher dream” of Ash Wednesday.
“T. S. Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’” by Bradley J. Birzer (2023)
This essay in the online journal the Imaginative Conservative is a short analysis of the poem that examines its main point and purpose: Eliot produced “a sacramental vision of time and place.” Birzer also acknowledges that some of the details of the poem remain a mystery, and that Eliot himself did not throw much light on them. It seems that a student once asked him what he meant by the line, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree,” and Eliot replied, “I mean, ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree,’” which the student no doubt found less than helpful.
“T. S. Eliot’s Conversion from Unitarianism to Anglo-Catholicism” by Junichi Saito (2019)
This short paper discusses Eliot’s familial and cultural roots in Unitarianism and how he moved beyond Unitarianism to Anglo-Catholicism in the 1920s. Saito also briefly discusses how Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism changed the type of poetry that he wrote.
Listen to Poem
This is an undated audio recording of T. S. Eliot reading Ash Wednesday.
Related Titles
By T. S. Eliot
