Faith and God in T.S.

Eliot, with reference to Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets

T.S. Eliot’s exploration of God and the meaning of Faith in his poetry is intimately connected with his

aesthetic vision and broader conception of poetry. In Eliot, there is a close connection between

structural unity and philosophical truth, something expressed in his essay on Dante that: “the

philosophy is essential to the structure and that the structure is essential to the poetic beauty of its

parts”, expressive of the interrelation between philosophical content and form, and how they both

inform one another. Eliot’s concern with fragmentation, as in Ash-Wednesday or The Waste Land,

corresponds with the tension generated by Modernity and literary Modernism, and Eliot’s consistent

attempts to find synthesis and a firm foundation for objective values and profound human experience

are dependent and enriched by his formalistic, as well as content displayed, play with division and

confusion. At the same time, his own view of the poet is radical in the need to “escape from emotion”

and corresponds to his Symbolist aesthetic which attempts to use imagery and metaphor to reach the

Divine, drawing parallels with St. Thomas Aquinas’s own use of Analogy as a way of describing God.

The relationship between the immanent this-world and the numinous lies at the crux of not only Faith,

but also of Eliot’s search for purpose and meaning in the world and the role which Art plays therein.

In Four Quartets there is a sophisticated exploration of timelessness and the moment of the ‘dance’,

alluding to Boethian conceptions of God which alone with the Incarnation can surpass and, as a result,

validate time. Chronologically, one can also see a development from Neo-Christian and Eastern

thought in The Waste Land through to the whole, structured High Anglican metaphysical world

presented in Four Quartets.

The first section of Ash-Wednesday immediately draws tension between faith and doubt, both

showing a withdrawal from God and yet a need for the Divine:

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

The variations on “Because I do not hope to turn again” works on several dimensions; for one, it

negates the concept of “hope” and provides a tone of rejection from the beginning of the poem. This is

further enhanced by the fact that the first three lines are an allusion to a Cavalcanti poem about

despair; this undermines the seemingly forceful resolution in the first few lines, enhanced by their

heavily plosive quality with three B’s and D’s, five T’s, and three P’s in three lines which makes them

aurally powerful and resolute. At the same time, there is an awareness of the sacrifice and desolation

caused by abandonment of God, and the speaker never truly disbelieves in God himself. The speaker

questions “Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?”, providing another allusion, this time to St.

Augustine’s Confessions but inverting the original’s positive emotional implications: “O Lord our

God, under the shadow of Thy wings let us hope; protect us, and carry us. Thou wilt carry us both

when little, and even to hoar hairs wilt Thou carry” (Augustine/Pusey 55). The adjective “agèd” and

the verb “stretch” evoke a sense of age and difficulty, as well as the extra effort required to say the

accented “è”, which directly contradicts Augustine’s “even to hoar hairs wilt Thou carry”; at the same

time, the questioning does not provide full certainty as though the speaker is still hoping for the faith

he has rejected, something further reinforced by the structural break from the main body of the stanza

which the parenthesis cause. The next couple of stanzas also attempt to firmly grasp disbelief and yet

undermine themselves in doing so:

Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

again

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual for only one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessèd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice (Eliot 89)

Here, the same lexical construction “Because I do not hope” is re-used, both providing an

argumentative unity but at the same time being changed; a focus is instead placed on knowledge and

thought rather than the physical turning away from God. This creates an odd tension as the speaker

seems to condemn himself, “Because I know I shall not know / The one veritable transitory power”, “I

shall not know” once again not denying the existence of God but merely knowledge of him. The

alternative to God is, at the same time, confessed to be unbearable: Eliot drawing on familiar imagery

of thirst and drought. Just as in The Waste Land, where “here is no water but only rock”, the speaker

“cannot drink”. But whereas in The Waste Land there is only desert, in Ash-Wednesday “trees flower,

and springs flow” enhancing the pain which the speaker feels and providing a strong counterpoint

between external beauty and internal angst. Northrop Frye rightly emphasises that Ash-Wednesday

“belong[s] to [Eliot’s] “purgatorial” vision” (72), as well as the connection between Dante’s

Purgatorio and Eliot’s own adaptation of it in section III but he fails to capture the elements of

Inferno and Hell in the first section, the speaker wilfully rejecting the “blessèd face”, in other words

the beatific vision, and his hopelessness, his “wings are no longer wings to fly / But merely vans to

beat the air”, with salvation seemingly impossible. In fact, Eliot develops a nuanced tension between
Purgatory and Hell in the first stanza, possible as the speaker is still in this world; this is shown

through the petitionary lines “And pray to God to have mercy upon us”, “May the judgement not be

too heavy upon us”, and “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death”. The first is situated

just after the need to “construct something / Upon which to rejoice”, the lack of punctuation

connecting the construction of an idol with a call for mercy, once again subverting the attempt to

reject God. The final one is drawn from the Hail Mary and structurally unites the first and second

sections, providing the ‘objective correlative’ for the Marian imagery and meditation to the “Lady”.

It is in the second “Lady” section that God is united to Eliot’s Symbolist aesthetic vision; the section

begins:

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of day, having fed to satiety

On my legs my heart my liver and that which has been contained

In the hollow round of my skull And God said

Shall these bones live? shall these

Bones live? And that which has been contained

In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

Because of the goodness of this Lady, and because

She honours the Virgin in meditation,

We shine with brightness.

The famous opening, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree / In the cool of day, having

fed to satiety” exemplifies Eliot’s attempt to use symbolism and imagery to express the ultimate

nature of reality and the Ideal; as Ezra Pound claims, talking about his own poetry but relevant to

Eliot, “The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language. One is

tired of ornamentations”. Furthermore, “three white leopards” is itself an allusion to Dante,

illustrating the value of tradition for Eliot in forming one’s own poetry. The importance of this can be
seen in Eliot’s seminal work Tradition and the Individual Talent where Eliot argues that the “existing

monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new

(the really new) work of art among them” (37). What occurs in this passage both draws from Dante

but also reformulates it for his own purposes; the ‘white leopard’ in Dante indicative of Lust,

something which is contrasted by the “goodness”, “meditation”, and causing others to “shine with

brightness” which the Lady of the second section possesses and elicits respectively. The purity of the

Lady, in her “white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown” is contrasted with the “whiteness of

bones which atone to forgetfulness”, drawing the similarities and yet differences between the speaker

and the Lady.

The fruition of the poem’s argument, that man can only find fulfilment in God, can be seen in the final

four sections. As Northrop Frye rightly identifies, section III is explicitly purgatorial:

At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister

[…]

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below;

There were no more faces and the stair was dark”

Frye associates the “second stair” with the “escalina or winding mountain of Dante’s purgatory” (72),

something shown through the grotesque images the speaker conveys, such as “old man’s mouth,

drivelling, beyond repair”, or “the toothed gullet of an agèd shark”. It is here that the speaker finally

provides his personal appeal to God:

Lord, I am not worthy

Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.

“speak the word only” offers not so much a command as a plea for the Divine, something which

previously not confessed in the speaker’s attempts to turn away. The poem’s conclusion fulfils this

with a near repetition of the beginning:

Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn

The “although” not only distinguishes this new affirmation and commitment, to God rather than

against Him, it also transforms the Cavalcanti original again shifting it from despair to joy. The final

line of the poem, separated from the other stanzas, “And let my cry come unto Thee” provides a sense

of intimacy, through the verb “cry”, and also a sense of physical intimacy.

Ash-Wednesday ends with a certain wholeness and completion which is pivotal in Eliot’s transition to

Four Quartets. In Four Quartets, God’s relationship to Time and human experience forms the crux of

the work. In ‘Burnt Norton’ movement, tenses of time, and stillness emerge as major concerns:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable

Eliot’s speaker interacts with Boethius’s model of God as timeless perceiver of the world where

eternity “the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment”. This is combined with

the “still point” without which “there would be no dance, and there is only the dance”. The “dance”

stands as a symbol for the Incarnation, once again interacting with the Symbolist method which Eliot

utilises to express the ideal. In ‘East Coker’ the notion of Eternity extends to the relationship between
decay and permanence, where “In my beginning is my end” serves as a leitmotif which highlights

man’s own mortality, like the surroundings around him:

In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. (177)

The consistent destruction and conversion of the old runs parallel with concerns of modernity and

industrialisation, as well as the state of humanity itself. At the same time, tradition endures as in:

The association of man and woman

In dausinge, signifying matrimonie -

A dignified and commodious sacrament.

Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

Whiche betokeneth concorde (178)

This passage is striking in many ways; for one, it is written in the original archaic spellings which

transforms the nature of the allusion and makes their meaning paradoxically both fixed in a particular

time but also relevant and timeless in its ability to be remoulded and fit into Eliot’s own verse,

perhaps echoing the enduring value of the ritual of marriage itself down the ages. Simultaneously, the

original was written by Thomas Elyot, an ancestor of Eliot’s, thereby providing a further layer of

tradition besides the literary, and by being in the poem thereby intersecting these different forms of

tradition and seemingly making them timeless. This tension between the timeless and the ephemeral is

further developed throughout the passage, but in the case of human experience God allows it to

ultimately be eternal and immortal; by ending ‘East Coker’ with “In my end is my beginning” he

subverts the decay which the ‘end’ would otherwise provide. ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘Little Gidding’

both illustrate the fulfilment of this Christian promise to overcome death and the world itself with the

‘dance’. In ‘Little Gidding’ this is illustrated by how “the fire and the rose are one”, the rose a

reference to Dante’s through which he sees the Christian Saints in Paradise; the title ‘Little Gidding’,
taken from a High Anglican Parish Church, provides a particular, domestic setting which can ground

and is transposed by the broader metaphysical reality which Eliot is trying to convey but which, in

this way, becomes more accessible.

Eliot’s Symbolist vision drives his exploration of God in Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, the

combination of sharp imagery and the baselessness of life without God form the crux of his religious

poetry. R. Berengaten, perhaps, expresses Eliot’s aim most effectively in his ‘Invocation’, “I shall

teach you a poetry transparent and pure / as the wind and as impossible to pin down as light”. It is this

subtlety which pervades Eliot’s attempts to express the numinous completely and wholly through

human language and experience.

Commentary:
I really enjoyed this week’s essay and felt passionate writing about Eliot. I am not sure if I gave full
justice to what, I perceive, to be Eliot’s theological vision and feel it was a difficult topic to wield at
times; I especially feel I did not provide sufficient depth or analysis of ‘Four Quartets’.
Bibliography:

Primary Texts:

Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays. Ed. Valerie Eliot. Faber and Faber, 1969.

Eliot, T.S. “The Art of Poetry No.1”. Interview with Donald Hall. Paris Review, Issue 21, 1959

(https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4738/t-s-eliot-the-art-of-poetry-no-1-t-s-eliot -

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Eliot, T.S. “Dante”, in The Sacred Wood; Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1921). (Bartleby:

http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw14.html - 19/11/2017)

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in The Sacred Wood; Essays on poetry and

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(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm - 22/11/2017)

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