Literary Helpdesk: …et in pulverem reverteris.

Victoria Seed

This is the day the Church puts on ashes to make the beginning of our great season of penitence. Traditionally, this sign of penitence is heralded with the proclamation: Memento, homo, quia pulvis est, et in pulverem reverteris. (Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.) Sober words for a sober season.

TS Eliot’s Ash Wednesday is sometimes called his “conversion poem”–it was written a few years after Eliot joined the Anglican communion–and sometimes read as a poem of renunciation, a paean to Christian asceticism. Still others see in the verse more of Bradley’s Idealism–on which Eliot wrote his doctoral dissertation–than Christian tradition. Eliot himself was notoriously unhelpful in clarifying his words. When asked what he meant by the line “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree” he replied “I meant ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree.’”

As Eliot recklessly left himself open to every interpretation under the sun, I have long aspired to as add my own to the pile, and someday, when all my other responsibilities and projects magically resolve themselves, I shall write a book (or at the very least a substantial essay) on Ash Wednesday as a work of ecclesiology, specifically a meditation on the mediacy of the Church in conversion and penitence. This is what the title points to. No mention of Ash Wednesday itself occurs in the poem itself, but Ash Wednesday is so-called with respect to the liturgy of the Church, the imposition of ashes. The title points the way, and echoes the pronouncement that we are dust unto dust. 

Perhaps the most well known lines from Ash Wednesday, apart from “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree,” are the opening:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn

These words recur at the outset of the final section with “Because” replaced by “Although”, contrasting a state where the penitent is stymied because of lack of hope and one where he is borne forward despite his own deficiencies. 

The other motif is a plea, repeated verbatim in the first and last sections:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

But it is set differently in the verse. Unlike the first motif, which is changed so subtly one could mistake it for straight repetition, the second motif is set so differently one might miss the repetition altogether. 

Section I:

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Section VI:

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

The striking contrasts between these two passages–the dusty aridity and fractious futility of the first passage versus the lush garden, abundant flowing water, and peace of the latter; a few lines previously there is a reference to “Unbroken wings”–cluster around the same petition: Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. 

Eliot loved a good paradox, but there is no real contradiction in the line. The idea of caring or not caring about the wrong things is at the root of all our sinful habits, anything that keeps us from God. We might read it as “Teach us to care [about what is good] and not to care [about the rest]. Teach us to sit still.” It is this balance of the heart, this capacity for internal stillness that the Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving cultivate. They tinker with our worldly attachments and desires, stop us chasing after them, and offer the possibility of peace. 

During the pandemic the air can feel as small and dry as the Eliot finds it at the outset of Ash Wednesday, and the will easily contracts, succumbing to a sort of lassitude that is neither care nor stillness. This is the very ground for which the season of Lent with its discipline is most needed. Lent is the remedy for aridity, not its cause. Neither Eliot nor the Church expect us to remain in the desert forever, nor to traverse it in one go. The soul in Eliot’s poem slogs through the desert littered with bones, up a tower, and espies a distant garden, then nearly succumbs to a Babble-like cacophony before arriving at the blue-rocked shore, a penitent still, but one at peace in the will of God.

We need Lent precisely because life is hard. It always will be. We are dust unto dust.

Victoria Seed is a writer and editor; she works in publishing.