Eliot's Ash-Wednesday

eliot
Originally uploaded by mincaye.

I love T.S. Eliot's poetry. When giving his speech at the Nobel Banquet on 10 December 1948, he said:

"Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them.

But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding we can get in no other way... When a poet speaks to his own people, the voices of all the poets of other languages who have influenced him are speaking also."

Maybe that is why his monumental works, Four Quartets and The Waste Land, have references to both Eastern and Western thought, encompassing a wide range of philosophical and religious ideas.


Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish Academy remarked on T.S. Eliot, prior to the speech:

"The position you have long held in modern literature provokes a comparison with that occupied by Sigmund Freud, a quarter of a century earlier, within the field of psychic medicine... In his opinion there must be sought a collective and individual balance, which should constantly take into account man's primitive instincts.

You, Mr. Eliot, are of the opposite opinion. For you the salvation of man lies in the preservation of the cultural tradition, which, in our more mature years, lives with greater vigour within us than does primitiveness, and which we must preserve if chaos is to be avoided.

Tradition is not a dead load which we drag along with us, and which in our youthful desire for freedom we seek to throw off. It is the soil in which the seeds of coming harvests are to be sown, and from which future harvests will be garnered."


This year, I will be participating in the International School of Kuala Lumpur's South-East Asian Forensics Tournament once again. It will be my fifth, a record for any student from my school, the Victoria Institution.

I intend to attempt Oral Interpretation, an event in which I've no experience. But since this is my final year, I thought of giving it a shot. If all goes well, I'll be reading excerpts from Eliot's poem, 'Ash-Wednesday.'

The text can be found here:

http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~gjm11/poems/ashwed.html


Just a sampling of some of my favourite lines:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?...

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word...

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.