Today is Ash Wednesday, and so a good moment to find some time to read and think about Eliot's beautiful poem. As ever, the first thing is to read it for ourselves, trust it, and trust ourselves to respond to it without any initial external aid. Eliot believed that a poem could have multiple meanings; and we can give the rich images of 'Ash Wednesday' our own private meanings, letting its oblique narrative us take us on a personal journey.Here is an audio of Eliot reading 'Ash Wednesday'.
After which, of course, listening to other readers and learning from them is a sane and sensible thing to do. From the mountain of academic commentaries (most of them unread by me) here are a few that I have found helpful and stimulating.
T S Eliot's Ash Wednesday: Conversion and the Transcendent - short online commentary. I can't find an author's name.
Denis Donoghue, T S Eliot and the Poem Itself. Donoghue writes beautifully about Eliot (I recommend his book Words Alone) and this is a long and rewarding essay about and around 'Ash Wednesday', originally published in the Partisan Review.
Theodore Morrison, 'Ash Wednesday': A Religious History. Very clear article, from 1938. [JSTOR]
Two articles tracing parallels between Eliot and Dante:
Audrey T Rogers, T S Eliot's "Purgatorio": the Structure of "Ash Wednesday". Detailed commentary, linking it to the 'mythic structure' of Dante. There is no need to know the Dante to follow the article. [JSTOR]
Sister M Cleophas, Ash Wednesday: the Purgatorio in a Modern Mode [JSTOR]
