Ash Wednesday

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1915)

Eliot’s first published poem, this is a dramatic monologue spoken by a middle-aged man, Prufrock, who is acutely aware of the futility, pointlessness, and superficiality of his existence. He would like to change his life, to discover some meaning and purpose to it, but he is chronically indecisive and too timid to try for something better. He knows all this and speaks of himself in a self-deprecating way. Unlike the speaker in Ash Wednesday, he does not reach out to religion to cure his malaise. Many early readers were baffled by the poem but it soon became recognized as a significant Modernist work, reflecting the themes of alienation and purposelessness that were common in the poetry of the time.

“Little Gidding” by T. S. Eliot (1942)

This is the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets, and it can also be read as an individual poem. Like Ash Wednesday, it seeks to trace a path beyond the suffering of the world into a timeless reality in which “All shall be well / And all manner of thing shall be well.” Little Gidding is a village in England with a long history.