T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” has been described by poet Edwin Muir as “one of the most moving poems he [Eliot] has written, and perhaps the most perfect.” It is Eliot’s “conversion poem,” written at the time that he formally declared himself to the Anglican church, to which he baptised and confirmed in 1928. However, Eliot’s poem is not an ecstasy, or mystical vision—it does not dramatize the encounter with the divine as the central issue of the poem. Rather, “Ash-Wednesday” must be seen as working out the tension between matter and spirit and a contemplation on the conscious choice to pursue God.

Written between 1927 and 1930, the first three sections were published separately—part I as “Perch' Io non Spero” in Spring 1928; part II as “Salutation” in December 1927 and January 1928; and part III as “Som de l'escalina” in Autumn 1929. The poem was published in its final, complete form in 1930. The poem unsettled some secular critics, while others remarked upon its theological and philosophical depth, and said it was the best poem he had written.

While not as allusive as The Waste Land or as structurally complex as the Four Quartets, the poem includes many references to literature both ancient and modern, especially Dante, Shakespeare, and of course, the Bible.

Five years earlier, Eliot wrote a despairing critique of the materialistic world he perceived around him in his poem The Hollow Men ends with the pathos of ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’.

It is particularly Dante and his ‘Divine Comedy’ that is key to understanding Ash Wednesday. Two of Eliot’s most famous earlier poems directly draw on Dante’s work: the epigraph to ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and the lines about the ‘Unreal City’ in The Waste Land (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’) are a n approximate translation from Dante’s original Italian.

Eliot also draws on another poem by Dante, the Vita Nuova (literally ‘New Life’), a collection of courtly love poems about idealised beauty and its relation to religious faith. Ash-Wednesday is not only a religious poem, but also a love poem — that is, spiritual rather than worldly love. The female figures who appear in the poem, the ‘Lady’ and the ‘veiled sister’, reflect the Virgin Mary rather than any earthly woman.

After the misanthropic earlier compositions, Eliot offers in Ash Wednesday redemption through God, spiritual growth and joy.

The verse is free-flowing with irregular line-length and stanza lengths. Subtle irregular rhyme provides some coherence. Imagery established in the first stanza is picked up in later stanzas and on to the end.

Eliot reads the poem aloud: