“Sovegna vos” in Eliot’s Marian Poems: Falsehood ...

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“Sovegna vos” in Eliot’s
Marian Poems: Falsehood,
Separation, and Ash-Wednesday

Abstract: One thing is certain about it, and that is
Lancelot Andrewes’s influence pervades Ash-Wednesday:
from the word “turn” that he “squeezed” in his sermons,
to the account of “the Word within and for . . . The
world,” to the matter of the Incarnation’s centrality. In
these six poems, Eliot asks a great deal of his reader,
requiring us to “Be mindful,” especially in comparing
and distinguishing the different voices represented and
dramatized. The reader may then grasp how the “Lady”
(of medieval romance) differs from the “Lady of silences,”
the Blessed Virgin and the thematic and rhetorical center
of the poems: She “speaks” “without word,” this embodied
paradox, reminding us of the “impossible union” figured
in the Incarnation. Ash-Wednesday works against the
“separation” that the speaker prays to avoid, alongside
other “falsehoods” that “mock” us.
Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the
Word: Intersections of Literature and Christianity. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. doi: 10.1057/9781137381637.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381637 55

10.1057/9781137381637preview - T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word, G. Douglas Atkins

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[Pascal] succeeded in giving expression to the scepticism of every
human being. For every man who thinks and lives by thought
must have his own scepticism, that which stops at the question,
that which ends in denial, or that which leads to faith and which
is somehow integrated into the faith which transcends it. And
Pascal, as the type of one kind of religious believer, which is highly
passionate and ardent, but passionate only through a powerful and
regulated intellect, is in the first sections of his unfinished Apology
for Christianity facing unflinchingly the demon of doubt which is
inseparable from the spirit of belief.

—T.S. Eliot, “The Pénsees of Pascal”

Published by Eliot in 1930, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems continues to baffle, if
not befuddle, readers. I emphasize the subtitle as well as the title because
Ash-Wednesday is a composite or compound of parts, some of them previ-
ously published; it is six poems. Some readers think it all in all Eliot’s most
impressive achievement, while others agree that it is remarkable but find
it even more “elusive” than Four Quartets or The Waste Land, than even the
enigmatic poem “The Hollow Men.” That elusive quality, I shall suggest, may
well derive, at least in large part, from its solid basis in and commitment
to Incarnational thinking of the sort represented by Lancelot Andrewes,
and Incarnation Eliot knew to be “The hint half guessed, the gift half
understood.”1 Arguably, the greatest Marian poem of the twentieth century,
Ash-Wednesday shows its fiercest indebtedness to Incarnational understand-
ing in its vivid, discriminating explorations into the Virgin’s key role as
humankind’s necessary medium, a mediator at least as important to Eliot as
Beatrice was to Dante, the poet Eliot considered the greatest of them all.

Over a half-century ago, Hugh Kenner wrote insightfully about its
represented sensibility. With humility that belies the enormous capa-
ciousness, broad and deep knowledge, and critical acumen displayed in
his unique way of reading closely, Kenner offers this summation:

Without specifying what evades specification, it is permissible for com-
mentary to suggest that the opposite pull of the senses and the devotional
spirit—of God’s creation and God—is to be maintained as a fruitful and
essential equivocalness, not “solved” by relegating one half of the being
to the earth and the other half to heaven, nor yet, as in the Buddhist Fire
Sermon [of The Waste Land], by becoming “weary of the knowledge of the
visible” and so “empty of desire.”2

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381637

10.1057/9781137381637preview - T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word, G. Douglas Atkins

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