30
PARTISAN REVIEW
According to Northrop Frye, the dreams are "the dreams of waking
consciousness, memory, and dream proper, all of them animated by
desire, all of them having no end but death." Well, yes, I suppose so; but
in the dark of the confessional the speaker must tell as much truth as he
knows and can bring himself to say, including the secular truth of plea–
sure and memory. The clause "though I do not wish to wish these
things" indicates that the things must be irresistible if they survive the
discouragement of the repeated verbs: it is far more difficult ro rid one–
self of those never-to-be-forgotten pleasures than the gift and scope dis–
avowed in the first section by another doubled verb-"I no longer strive
to strive towards such things." And so it should be, else the spiritual
voiding achieved in the Confessional is spurious. It is the compelling
quality of the sensory experiences, forcing themselves upon the peni–
tent's examination of conscience and being acknowledged there, that
makes "Ash-Wednesday" a telling as well as a confessing poem. The
poem ends, as it should, with the prayer: "And let my cry come unto
Thee." But in the meantime there are the cries of other occasions, as in
"The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying." Davie might find this
last phrase unnecessary, and it would be if semantics were king, but here
the perception turning back upon itself becomes a caress of acknowl–
edgment and exhilaration, with energy propelled from "towards" in the
previous line: "From the wide window towards the granite shore." A
similar gesture in the third poem gives us "Blown hair is sweet, brown
hair over the mouth blown," and in the fourth poem "White light
folded, sheathed about her, folded." The certitude of the cadence in
these lines is an acknowledgment of values the penitent is not obliged to
renounce, unless renunciation must be so drastic as to include life itself.
The three dictions I have isolated work, in the poem, to achieve a crit–
ical perspective beyond anyone of them, just as a symphony or a string
quartet as an achieved form is beyond the workings of the individual
instruments it accommodates. The perspective can hardly be called any–
thing but Language, a force of expressiveness prior to any particular
expression
it
allows. Reading "Ash-Wednesday," we need to have such
an abstraction in mind, if only to account for the distinctive style that
exerts critical pressure upon the intimations of worldly gratification in
the passages I have quoted.
It
is the style that, more than any other fac–
tor, makes it possible to think of "Ash-Wednesday" as the redemption
of
The Waste Land
and "The Hollow Men." How to describe it?
It
is as
if the first two dictions-the liturgical and the literary-were combined
in one, and in that guise stood aside from the worldly pleasures, not to
shame them but to submit them to more exacting discriminations. The
