Ash Wednesday

Eliot was a very learned man, in philosophy as well as literature, and he liked to use that learning in his work. The Waste Land may well be the most densely-allusive poem of the twentieth century, and many of the allusions are obscure. Eliot even supplied his own seven-page set of notes to explain them. The literary and religious figures he quotes or alludes to include poets Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine; the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights Shakespeare, John Webster, Thomas Kyd, and Thomas Middleton; the religious figures Ezekiel, Buddha, and St. Augustine, and opera composer Richard Wagner. Sometimes Eliot alludes to them in passing, sometimes he quotes them exactly, and at other times he presents an ironic variation on their words.

It is thus no surprise that Ash Wednesday contains many allusions to literary and biblical sources, including Shakespeare, Dante, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, and an Italian poet named Guido Cavalcanti. In a ballad Cavalcanti wrote in 1300, a man dying in exile tells his beloved that he will not be able to return, which finds an echo in Eliot’s first line, “Because I do not hope to turn again.” The most pervasive literary influence on the poem, however, is Dante Alighieri. It is Dante’s figure of Beatrice who lies behind Eliot’s presentation of the venerated Lady who is closely identified with the Virgin Mary.

Beatrice was a real woman. Her name was Beatrice di Folco Portinari. Born in 1266, she was a year or so younger than Dante. They met when Dante was not yet nine years old. He conceived a great love for her even then and remained captivated by her throughout his life, even though they did not meet again until nine years later, in 1283. Beatrice married in 1287 and died three years later, at the age of 25. Dante also married and had children. He wrote of Beatrice in his autobiographical text La Vita Nuova (“The New Life”), a mix of poetry and prose, published in 1294. In the medieval tradition of chaste courtly love, he described his feelings for Beatrice, whom he regarded as virtually a divine being in earthly form. He continued to write about Beatrice, now presented as a heavenly soul of indescribable beauty, in The Divine Comedy, in which she acts as his guide and intercedes for him to ensure that he can attain a vision of paradise.

Eliot’s Lady was likely inspired by Dante’s Beatrice, and she serves a similar function—she points the poem’s speaker in the direction of God, ensuring that he is lifted out of his dispirited state and attains a new vision of the divine realm. As in The Divine Comedy, in which Dante not only likens Beatrice to the Virgin Mary but even equates her with the Virgin, in Ash Wednesday the Lady and the Virgin Mary seem to merge into one figure in Part II. The Rose which is associated with the Lady/Virgin in Part II also suggests Dante, since he uses the rose as a symbol for the Virgin Mary; she is “the Rose in which the Word Divine / Became incarnate” (Paradise, Canto 23, Lines 73-74).

Other passages in Ash Wednesday also reveal Dante’s influence. The title of Part III, when it was published as an independent poem, was “Som de l’Escalina” (“the summit of the stairs”), which is from Dante’s Purgatory (Canto 26, Line 146). “Sovegna vos” (Part IV, Line 11), meaning “Be mindful,” is also a quotation from Purgatory (Canto 26, Line 147). Finally, the important line near the end of the poem, “Our peace in His will” (Part VI, Line 30) is very close to a line from Dante’s Paradise: “E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace” (“And his will is our peace”). This statement sums up the reality of the blessed souls; they are joyful, even though the speaker here—a former nun named Piccarda dei Donati—is not high in the hierarchy of paradise. She is, however, content with the position to which she has been assigned by God.