The Story Archive

Ash Wednesday

T. S. Eliot · 1930 CE · Poem · English · Modernist

A speaker who does not hope to turn again renounces the blessed face and the voice, then climbs a spiral stair past the distraction of the world toward a garden and a lady in white among the yews. Liturgical fragments, the Ave Maria and the bones of the prophet's valley surface between the six sections. Eliot's first long poem after his reception into the Church of England, its opening line a translation of Cavalcanti.

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