Ash Wednesday
Inspired by the T.S. Eliot poem Ash Wednesday
Prints presented with artist’s commentary.
Stanza I
Print Title: I Cannot Hope to Turn Again
Poem Text: Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope to turn…
The first stanza speaks of an old man near death. He is saying: “Because I do not hope to turn again/ Because I do not hope/Because I do not hope to turn.” There is no longer anything to look forward to. It is the time past ambition, power, glory. All things are past. He thinks of himself as an aged eagle that can no longer stretch its wings: “these wings are no longer wings to fly/ But merely empty vans to beat the ari.” All that is left to him now is to seek some reconciliation with himself. Not to swell and “too much discuss” with himself the mistakes of the past. I have tried to depict these ideas by focusing on the face of a gaunt, aged man, and in the background suggesting the wings of an eagle.
Stanza II
Print Title: Woman of Silence
Poem Text: Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety…
In the second stanza the focus is shifted from the man to a series of his imaginative visions or “dreams.” A lady and “three leopards sit under a juniper-tree.” Eliot speaks of them as having fed upon his legs, heart, liver and brains. He is a skeleton picked dry by them and yet he is to pray to the source of his death for life. I have placed the image of a skeleton in the desert on the left side with the large figure of a woman on the right. Someone called it to my attention that the legs were large, muscular, full of life, but that the face was almost a skull. This aptly described the ambiguous nature of this woman symbol which recurs in the rest of the poem. She is described as death, but (in the image of the Virgin Mary) we are asked to pray to her for life. He almost seems to be saying that these traditional religious images have played us false, that they have brought us a kind of death because we have understood them in the wrong way. Here also begins the image of the Garden (a symbol for paradise of afterlife). The other strong repeating image is of the desert, which reminds me of the Old Testament: Exodus, where God led his people out from Egypt, but into the desert, into the wilderness. He freed them from enslavement, but set them on a pilgrimage that has never ended, into a desert without visible answers. The desert is also used as an image where in great spiritual aridity the truth is finally encountered. Moses found God and his ethical commandments in the “desert” or, in other words, in the desert of his soul, where in contemplation “God” entered, and Moses reached a higher level of understanding. Also Christ used the image of fasting in the desert. The image of aridness, separateness, silence, aloneness -- a condition of the soul necessary for true mystical understanding. These are the three dominant images to follow: the woman, the garden
STANZA III
Print Title: At the Turning of the Stair
Poem Text: At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below…
The third stanza speaks of the turning of the stairs. (Eliot used the image of the stairs to describe the mystical
ascent. St. John o f the Cross described the same ascent to God through various levels of knowledge with the
image of a ladder.) Eliot seems to be asking for a reaffirmation of true religious knowledge rather than what is
so often substituted. The first stage of mysticism is the awakening and conversion. This is soon to be mixed with
both hope and despair, and Eliot describes this at the first turning of the second stair. Then comes the “dark knight”
where all familiar images abandon the soul and it is plunged into great despair: “the second turning of the second
stair…where there were no more faces and it was dark, damp, jagged.” At the first turning of the third stair he
sees through a window the image of a garden and a woman, and from the last image he then strives to go beyond
images, beyond hope and despair; he strives for that knowledge the mystic achieves which is beyond not only
images but all abstractions that man seeks to substitute for God. He achieves a true freedom and union with
God, if only momentarily. He is climbing the third stair seeking this, and he says, “Lord, I am not worthy.”
STANZA IV
Print Title: Redeem the Time
Poem Text: Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between…
The fourth stanza seem to indicate a kind of optimism, redeeming, restoring time. But again the death image comes in…” jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse,” and again the woman standing among yew trees (a symbol of death). We are what we are in time. We will be redeemed for what we have sought (not necessarily found), but the time cannot be redeemed. The dream cannot be redeemed. The last line says: “And after this our exile,” again referring back, I think, to the essential message of Exodus.
STANZA V
Print Title: The Word Unheard
Poem Text: If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
The fifth stanza speaks of the Word, the Word being the
Word even if it is unheard, unspoken. Even the rhythm
ofthe sentences and words sound like the last Gospel of
St. John. A repeating phrase also goes through this stanza,
“Oh my people, what have Idone unto thee” (God speaking).
I have used two perspectives for this print. The silent figure
of Man on the left -- unseeing, unhearing. The figures in
the center-right are seentop-down from God’s viewpoint.
The woman again is sought -- but to me she again seems not
a source of comfort, but of rejection. I show her in the upper
right-hand corner turning her back going away. Again the
two images of the desert and the garden are especially strong.
STANZA VI
Print Title: Time of Tension Between Birth and Dying
Poem Text: Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope…
The last and sixth stanza focuses again on man. He speaks of himself in “the dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying,” the “time of tension between dying and birth.” And he says “the blind eye creates the empty forms between the ivory gates.” Seeking consolation he has tried to create abstractions of what God is; he has tried to create something outside of himself to give him home, without finding it within himself. It reminded me of those people in the East who used to stare at the sun as part of their religion until they went blind. And for that reason I threw the head back and focused light on the eye and forehead. I felt the image of a man in tension between false images of God, apprehension about death, swelling on regrets of the past…and yet a man of past dignity and power, a man who could be capable of understanding, who could climb the stairs. He speaks of being among rocks in a desert: “Our peace in His will even among these rocks” … but His will cannot be known from the outside, His will is silent to ears who must hear words. The last line of the poem: “and let my cry come unto thee” is on the verge of utter despair.