Christian Romanticism: T. S. Eliot's Response to Percy Shelley By ...

Only through the recognition of past errors, and the subsequent renunciation of past attachments, could one progress towards the state of grace desired by every believer. It is surely no coincidence that this period of Eliot’s life also sees his longest critical essay, on Dante (1929), a poet whose Divine Comedy gave Eliot a model for the purgatorial ascent from sinful error towards blessedness. To be successful, however, the ascent must be one in which earthly things are renounced for the greater end and, in the language of ‘Ash Wednesday’, not “desired again”. Once this process of progression through renunciation has begun, there can be no turning back and no room for a retrospective glance, as the Porter guarding the Gate of Purgatory tells Dante:

Dante’s message in these lines is clear: the past holds nothing for the repentant sinner but their mistakes. To journey towards God is to keep looking forward, and give no heed, indeed to show contempt, for what is past. This theme figures strongly in Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’, in which past affiliations and deeds are renounced with the hope that God’s judgement will not be “too heavy” when they are weighed in the spiritual balance. References to ‘turning’ are plentiful in Eliot’s poem, and he writes that he does “not hope to turn again” as he is en route to a higher state, although temporarily in exile on earth.⁷ The past is in the past, and although it cannot be denied it can, and indeed must, be renounced.