28
PARTISAN REVIEW
was limiting and that the sequence would be better understood
without the Dantean reminders.
Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent in the Christian calendar; it
marks a period of prayer, fasting, and penance-"dust thou art and
unto dust shalt thou return"-that ends with Good Friday, Holy Satur–
day, and Easter Sunday. The Lenten weeks are a period of atonement,
mindful of the forty days and nights that Christ spent in the desert. It is
also the period during which, as I recall from my early years in Warren–
point and Dublin, we Roman Catholics are under obligation to make a
good Confession-that adjective having on the lips of my teachers,
Christian Brothers, nearly as much emphasis as the sacramental noun–
in preparation for the taking of Holy Communion: "Bless me father."
In this context, and with Leavis's commentary close by, there is no
merit in trying to name the germ, the embryo, from which "Ash–
Wednesday" or any of its constituent poems emerged. Eliot went out of
his way to articulate the rhythm without asserting anything. The best he
could hope for might be, in words from "Little Gidding," to arrive
where he started "and know the place for the first time." The first
impulse, the rhythm or germ, is his private business and must remain so.
But I'll risk the indelicacy of saying this. Suppose a man, recently con–
verted to Christianity, wished on Ash-Wednesday to join with his fellow
Christians in the ceremonies of Lent. Suppose, too, that he felt a scrupu–
lous hesitation, however vague or diffused: there is the fear of duplicity,
of false humility, of appearing to deny the world in ways he can't bring
himself to. He might find himself separating body and soul to a degree
merely officious. I assume that when Eliot spoke of the rhythm or the
germ, he meant what
F.
H. Bradley meant by "feeling," the first inner
stir, which is felt long before it has reached any of the stages we call an
emotion or an idea. From the moment of "firstness" it begins to nudge
itself toward articulation, however rudimentary. In Eliot's case, a few
arbitrary words, long before the orders of grammar or syntax came into
play, seem to have encouraged development. The ethical correlative of
this stirring, I imagine, is the possibility of achieving difficult sincerity,
so that the soul may take part in the rituals and sacraments of the Chris–
tian community in good faith.
Appropriately, then, Eliot's poem resorts to three fields of diction:
(I)
religious texts: the Old and New Testaments, rituals of Catholic devo–
tion, sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, the litany of the Blessed Virgin, the
"Hail Mary," and especially the Reproaches (" Improperia") of Good Friday–
"Ash-Wednesday" is in communion with Herbert's "The Sacrifice" and with
