Introduction 23it from Keats and Shelley, who in turn had been instructed by Wordsworth’s
crisis lyrics and odes, which go back yet further to Spenserian and Miltonic
models. Consider Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, his conversion-sequence of 1930.
The poem’s six movements are not a Dantesque Vita Nuova, despite Eliot’s
desires, but a rather strict reenactment of the Wordsworthian drama of
experiential loss and compensatory imaginative gain:
(I) This is an ironic movement that says “I rejoice” but means “I
despair,” which is the limited irony that Freud terms a “reaction formation,”
or an emotion masking ambivalently as its opposite. Despite the deliberate
allusions to Cavalcanti and Dante, Ezekiel and the Mass, that throng the
poem, the presumably unintended echoes of Wordsworth’s Intimations of
Immortality Ode carry the reader closer to the center of the poet’s partially
repressed anxieties and to his poetic anxieties in particular. “The infirm
glory” and the “one veritable transitory power” are stigmata of the visionary
gleam in its flight from the poet, and if what is lost here is more-than-
natural, we remember that the loss in Wordsworth also transcends nature.
Though Eliot employs the language of mysticism and Wordsworth the
language of nature, the crisis for each is poetic rather than mystical or
natural. Eliot’s renunciation of voice, however ironical, leads directly to what
for many readers has been the most memorable and poignant realization in
the sequence: “Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something /
Upon which to rejoice.” No more illuminating epigraph could be assigned to
Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, or to “Tintern Abbey” or “Resolution and
Independence.” The absence lamented in the first part of Ash-Wednesdayis a
once-present poetic strength, whatever else it represented experientially. In
the Shakespearean rejection of the desire for “this man’s gift and that man’s
scope,” we need not doubt that the men are precursor poets, nor ought we
to forget that not hoping to turn again is also an ironic farewell to troping,
and so to one’s own quest for poetic voice.
(II) The question that haunts the transition between the first two sections,
pragmatically considered, is, “Am I, Eliot, still a poet?” “Shall these bones live?”
is a synecdochal question, whole for part, since the immortality involved is the
figurative survival of one’s poetry: “As I am forgotten / And would be forgotten,
so I would forget.” Turning around against himself, this poet, in the mode of
Browning’s Childe Roland, asks only to be numbered among the scattered
precursors, to fail as they have failed: “We have our inheritance.”
(III) After such self-wounding, the poet seeks a kind of Pauline kenosis,
akin to Christ’s emptying himself of his own Divinity, which here can only
mean the undoing of one’s poetic gift. As inspiration fades away willfully, the
gift wonderfully declares itself nevertheless, in that enchanted lyricism Eliot