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Study Notes – TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes Page HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 1 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes Preludes - Written between 1909 and 1911 in Boston, Paris and London - Pictures of modern city life, dwelling on lives of squalor and routine - Ends with poet’s response and indifference of the universe - Hopelessness of human condition, timeless, uncaring power, no belief system - Poetry is conflict within oneself, quarrel with oneself - Conflict between naturalistic intellect and a religious desire - Common theme of life in the dirty grimy city - Imitates contemporary classical music form o Defines a modern identity that is exquisitely aesthetic and problematic - Prelude 1 + 2 o Urban metropolis and modernity, city as sordid and threatening in its ordinariness o Meaning is elusive and ambiguous o Written Harvard 1910, response to French tradition from a distance One - Description of a city scape, depraved side of a modern city - Backdrop for depravities of human kind, diminished state, lack of spiritual achievement - Assault on the five senses from big city - Words such as ‘burnt-out’, ‘gusty’, ‘grimy’, ‘broken’ accumulate to give an impression of the city as dirty and dull - ‘lighting of lamps’ enhance the idea of an action being performed in unison across the city - Traditional poetic lyricism, conversational effects and rhyme, clever subversion - Heavily implicit theme of modern city weariness, boredom and alienation - Crowded living (smell of steaks ... passageways) – intimate sense of debris and squalor o Urban built up environment - Vacant lots – where garbage is left, gathers and settles down – decay Page 1 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 2 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - ‘broken blinds’ – return to the implicit theme of ruin in an urban physical environment - Heavy, insistent, subversive rhyme - Modern metropolis replaces late Romanticism, - Poem builds up a description of the modern city, based on New York and other American cities as well as Eliot’s knowledge of Europe at a distance - Urban crowds are implicit but unseen, vision of a strangely empty city wasteland of architecture, smells, images and debris of city life - Poet as a flaneur o Mixed identity, reference to the poet and the poet’s identity and understanding of the city, develops idea of poet walking through city and observing it Two - Preludes represents day in the life of a naturalist - Sympathy all the hands o Viewing sympathetically the life of the working class - Personification “The morning comes to consciousness” - ‘trampled’ and ‘press’ convey an aggressiveness and impatience about the city - ‘with the other masquerades / That time resumes’ is moralistic o Masquerade – a false show or pretence, disguise, life as a performance - More actions performed in unison (recalling stanza 1) “all the hands...” - Urban crowds of people are seen indirectly and selectively ‘muddy feet’ and ‘hands’ o The urban crowds of the modern city are composed of workers and the poor - Even greater emphasis on squalor ‘faint stale smells’ ‘dingy shades’ - Aesthetic squalor of ordinary people of modernity as a grounds for rejection, image that returns to poet’s identity and contrast to modernity Three - Female subject – nothing romantic about portrait of life yellow soles etc. - Second person effect brings reader into poem Page 2 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 3 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - “street hardly understands” personification again, - Final lines leave impression of filth - Paris blends with America into another unidentified and representative modern metropolis - Major change in perspective - In context the view is challengingly intimate, potentially decadent and even sexual - Character is ambiguous, poet and reader become combined, - Context of avant-garde tradition including Baudelaire and Laforgue o This is modernism where imagery turns dreamlike, strange and bizarre in a sophisticated, decadent and aesthetic way - Eliot shifts emphasis to a dimension with implicit questions about the conscience ‘your soul... sordid images’ - In a way that is characteristic of Eliot the meaning is ambiguous - ‘you’ is female (hair), ‘yellow’, ‘soiled’ add to impression of squalid prostitution - ‘vision... street hardly understands’ – beyond the understanding of ordinary people o What it means is unstated and unresolvable o Possible epiphany of aesthetic and spiritual sordidness o Or spiritual transcendence, a vision of universal spirit - Essential issue is the ending involves complicated and unresolved ambiguity and irony - Ending is a puzzle about an epiphany about the nature of the modern metropolis and modern identity, understatedly emotionally resonant Four - Powerful religious hunger conscience, I am moved, notion of some infinitely ... o Years later became Christian, first foreshadowing of religious development - Spiritual life, religious hunger v natural intellects - Moment of religious desire is embarrassing therefore ends with return to naturalistic reality - Vacant lots – spiritually - Laugh – at religious thought Page 3 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 4 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - “assured of certain certainties” – sarcasm nothing is certain - Final image – cynical acceptance and survival - Poet is present (I am moved) but also merged with a character (his soul) - Laforgue – dreamlike fantasy, bizarre, lyrical, clever playfulness, aestheticism - People of the city are as sordid as its physical wasteland “conscience of a black...” o People of the modern city torture and destroy the soul - First two lines suggest a return to epiphany – spiritual reaching out across the sky o Next lines turn that possibility into an image of torture and destruction - Lines 4-16 reject the possibility of spiritual salvation for tragic mockery in a vision of the world as meaningly and squalid - Ends with heavily ambiguous irony - Makes Preludes a set that develops in terms of the setting in the city and the developing themes of the city as material, aesthetic, and a spiritual wasteland Rhapsody on a windy night - Another variation on the theme of poetry in the manner of contemporary music - Ironic account of the reality of the decadence of contemporary Paris and its mad, sordid mindlessness - Avant-garde imagery that is dreamlike and bizarre as well as clever and sophisticated (in the manner of Laforgue) - Art – an imitation of the madness and evocations of madness in French Modernism - Setting of a moonlight windy night, street is deserted - Street lamps eventually dominate his walk, act as triggers to disorganised imaginings - Lamp post stimulates him to remembrance of unlikely and confused memories - Struggle between two views of moving present and inert past (lamp vs memory) - Windy moonlight distorts memories of speaker into a nightmare - Theme of the passage of time - Eliot composed this poem in the characteristic manner of the French symbolists, o Especially Laforgue who concentrated a number of fragmented, broken images to suggest the sordid life and squalor of a modern city . Evoke a mood of nightmarish horror Page 4 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 5 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - A situation that could be romantic—a midnight stroll in the lamplight and moonlight—is actually dominated by images of sterility, decay, isolation, and despair - Rhapsody does not explain feelings or thoughts in any general, conventional way. Readers must work to discover the complex patterns of meaning, sound, and structure underlying the stream of bizarre and banal images that make up the poem. - dictated by psychological connections - Takes reader into Paris as a city that is like a mad modern hell, return to normal is a return to a living death Stanza One - Begins a night’s walk through the city, emphasis is on the streets and how they are seen - Moonlight subverts the normal structures of the mind and replaces normality with dreamlike madness - Memory is lost and transformed, stressing a loss of normal standards and values Stanza Two - Woman who appears to be a prostitute - Implication that this other world offers itself to him - ‘Corner of her eye twists...’ a further exploration of dreamlike imagery that is bizarre and threateningly transgressive o Also an imitation of visions of drugs and madness, about cruelty, torture Stanza Three - Under drug-like influence, memory provides strange hallucinatory, dreamlike images - Continue theme of the debris of modernity (particularly spring) - Spring ready to snap suggest the mind at a point where it is ready to break into madness - Dreamlike avant-garde imagery Page 5 of 23 HSC English – Advanced – MODULE B - Critical Study of Texts – Study Notes – 6 TS Eliot Poems Complete Eliot Notes - Complex and contradictory ideas – madness of modernity Stanza Four - Vision: a cat connects with the memory of a child - Idea of eyes that are sightless and mindless - Old crab – icon of modern identity, grasping, driven by the need to have something - Dreamlike imagery, elaborated further, midnight kind of vision Stanza Five - Streetlamps continue to mark time - Line of French – moon not bearing a grudge o Confirms the Parisian identity of the city and the poem - Moon as a deranged, diseased, decadent goddess of modernity o Moon that ‘winks a feeble eye’ is linked with the earlier prostitute - A climax of dark, mad and subversive,
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