Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

These lines come from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash-Wednesday” (1930), written after his 1927 conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and during a period of spiritual reorientation following the disillusionment and fragmentation often associated with his earlier work (e.g., *The Waste Land*). “Ash-Wednesday” is structured as a sequence of meditative sections that dramatize a difficult turn from worldly desire and distraction toward penitence, prayer, and the possibility of grace. The imagery of hair, music, and stair-climbing belongs to the poem’s recurring movement between sensual memory and ascetic aspiration, as the speaker attempts to discipline the mind and will toward a higher, though uncertain, spiritual state.

The passage juxtaposes sensuous, intimate imagery (“blown hair… over the mouth”) with the language of mental struggle and spiritual ascent (“third stair,” “strength beyond hope and despair”). The “music of the flute” suggests enchantment or distraction—an aesthetic or erotic lure that interrupts disciplined attention—while the repeated “fading, fading” conveys both the waning of old attachments and the instability of the speaker’s resolve. The “third stair” functions as a symbolic stage in an arduous climb: not a triumphant arrival, but a precarious intermediate step where desire, memory, and prayer contend. Eliot’s significance here lies in rendering conversion not as certainty but as a strenuous, halting re-education of perception and longing.