Not the One You'd Think

Yes, it's Ash Wednesday and even heretic Protestants like me can sit up and take notice. The obvious choice, of course, is T.S. Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday."


I have to admit that it's been my tradition every year to read it on this day, but it just seemed far too self-evident and naff (look it up) to do my post today on it. Not to mention the thing is a billion pages too long for a blog.


So here's another one, and I can't imagine that T.S. could really complain.

Divine Meditation 3

John Donne

O might those sighs and tears return again
Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent,
That I might in this holy discontent
Mourn with some fruit, as I have mourned in vain;
In mine Idolatry what showers of rain
Mine eyes did waste! what griefs my heart did rent!
That sufferance was my sin; now I repent;
'Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.
Th' hydropic drunkard, and night-scouting thief,
The itchy lecher, and self-tickling proud
Have the remembrance of past joys for relief
Of comming ills. To (poor) me is allowed
No ease; for long, yet vehement grief hath been
Th' effect and cause, the punishment and sin.




I have to admit that I'd never even heard of John Donne until I read the Cliff's Notes on some of Eliot's minor poems. (You know, the ones where he rips whole phrases off of other poets' work.) But Donne is another writer who's never let me down no matter when I flip the pages open.


Donne was quite the ladies' man before he settled down with the two loves of his life, his wife Anne and Jesus. I really wonder if "self-tickling proud" is supposed to be a dirty onanism reference. Part of me would like to believe it - a vestige of Donne's younger, rakish self cracking through the old priest's stiff posture. But I highly doubt it. Still, one of the beauties of poetry is you get to keep the misreadings.


I also appreciate his point that grief can be both the result of sin, as well as the jumping-off point for more sin.

It all kind of feeds into the same pattern, strengthening and reinforcing the negative and self-destructive behavior. You can explain it using psychology, New Age philosophy, a bit of the old sackcloth-and-ashes, but it's the same problem. 

Who can deliver us from this body of death? Tune in to find out in 40 days.