Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live?
-from section II of “Ash Wednesday” by T. S. Eliot
After I recently read the above lines for the very first time, I couldn’t help but think to myself what an odd and, it must be noted, somewhat horrific image to evoke in a poem that seems to begin as a prayer of sorts. As I read through the rest of the poem, I continued to contemplate why Eliot would choose to include this picture and what kind of meaning it could have to the poem as a whole. I caught the whole reference to Ezekiel and the bones allusion (“And God said / Shall these bones live?”), but I still was struggling to put it all together in my mind (not an uncommon occurrence when I read poetry, trust me). After reading an article by James T. Bratcher about another source Eliot drew upon for this image (in Bratcher’s opinion, the primary source), I think I’ve come to a richer understanding of this section of “Ash Wednesday” and have formulated my own basic interpretation of how this section fits with the overall theme of the poem.
Bratcher asserts that Eliot’s primary source for this section of the poem is the story known as “The Juniper Tree,” number 47 of the over 200 “fairy tales” the Grimm brothers included in their collection Children and Household Tales in the early 1800s. As I was unfamiliar with this story, I found a link to a translation (listed at the end of this post) and read it from start to finish. The story features a man and woman very in love but unable to have children. Eventually, under a juniper tree the woman voices her desire for children and soon after conceives a son. The tale relates that she is so happy at his birth that she dies, and her husband buries her under the juniper tree. He eventually marries again and has a daughter with his new wife, who ends up being a pretty bitter stepmother to the son who is not hers. She feels that the boy is the only thing standing in the way of her daughter receiving the whole inheritance of the father, and she is thus so overcome with hatred for the boy that she ends up killing him… by decapitating him with the lid of a large, heavy chest! She then devises this scheme to make her little daughter believe that she’s the one who blew his head off, and to cover up his death, the stepmother ultimately chops the boy up and cooks him into a stew… that she then feeds to the unknowing father! Seriously? This is a children’s story?? (German children in the 1800s must have had much stronger stomachs than I!)
Anyway, the beauty of this “fairy tale,” in my opinion, comes when the boy’s half-sister, filled with grief, wraps his bones in a silk scarf and lays them under the juniper tree where his mother is buried. Miraculously, the boy's bones are transformed into a beautiful bird that can mesmerize people with its voice. The rest of the story involves several other minor characters, a gold chain, red shoes, and a millstone incident that… well, I’ve already said too much; I don’t want to spoil it too much for you if you haven’t already read it.
At any rate, it is this transformation portion of the tale that directly relates to the story of Ezekiel that I mentioned above (Ezekiel 37) and to section II of “Ash Wednesday.” In Ezekiel 37 we see God take the prophet Ezekiel to a valley filled with dried bones. God asks Ezekiel in verse three if the bones can live, and He exhorts Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones, which transforms them into a massive living army. Similarly, "that which had been contained" in the speaker’s bones in “Ash Wednesday” come to life to chirp out their own song. The whole bones-coming-to-life motif most obviously connects all of these works, but I also believe that these three stories connect on a more indirect level through the theme of resurrection or redemption. In all three works, the dry bones come to life; they don’t remain dead and dry and useless. I feel like this speaks to the overall theme of “Ash Wednesday,” in which the speaker, beat down in penitence from the weight of his sin, has come to God in repentance for his unbelief. In his guilt, he is empty and defeated, eaten up by his sin and basically reduced to a bunch of dry, useless bones. I believe it is in section II, however, where the speaker hints at the hope of redemption that comes after the sinner is made aware of and repents of his sin. I believe it is this hope in which the speaker prays in the final section of the poem.
I must say that I do somewhat disagree with Mr. Bratcher in that I believe that section II of “Ash Wednesday” follows the Ezekiel 37 passage more in intent than Grimm’s “The Juniper Tree.” There are a couple of reasons that I believe this, but as this post is already much longer than I intended, I will reserve my thoughts for another time.
Works Cited:
Bratcher, James T. “Significance of the Juniper-Tree Story for Eliot’s Ash Wednesday.” Notes & Queries 58.1 (2011): 110-112. Web. Academic Search Complete. 11 Sept. 2011.
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