"Preludes" by T.S. Eliot

"Preludes"

By T.S. Eliot

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-trampled street

With all its muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,

You lay upon your back, and waited;

You dozed, and watched the night revealing

The thousand sordid images

Of which your soul was constituted;

They flickered against the ceiling.

And when all the world came back

And the light crept up between the shutters

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed’s edge, where

You curled the papers from your hair,

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city block,

Or trampled by insistent feet

At four and five and six o’clock;

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties,

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

“Preludes” by T.S. Eliot is a four part poem, but for the sake of brevity in both my blog post and my recitation, I chose to focus on the fourth and final part. (I think it was fate for me to come across this poem, as a piano prelude by Chopin had just graced my shuffled Spotify playlist. How pretentious does that sound?!). “Preludes” provides four glimpses into city life, each one with a looming sense of grime, clutter, and an overall melancholy. The whole poem is stacked like a crowded city street, with portraits of daily life framed in blackened vignettes cast by urban gloom. Getting this bleak vibe from the poem wasn’t too tough, and neither was realizing that Eliot is, if not cynical towards urban life, then at least disillusioned by its wilted masses.

The “His” that kicks off the fourth part is more than a little confusing, however. Perhaps this is a product of both being raised in a predominantly Christian community and having gone to an Episcopalian school, but God comes to mind when searching for the antecedent of “His”. With the sordid wildness that (ironically) seems to come hand in hand with a developed, industrialized society, God, or His holy influence, presence, what have you, has become stretched tightly across the city, and trampled beneath its occupants, “tightly” in this sense not meaning firmly, but rather meaning “precariously” or “thinly”. What do you think, dear reader? Am I totally misreading this? Though “Preludes” is made mostly of the close-up details of daily urban life, the poem as whole remains broad in many respects…. Perhaps this soul, "His soul", belongs to a city dweller, a nameless man stretched out, beaten down, and worn thin by the city….

The title of the poem also proves cryptic. A prelude is an introduction, a lead-in to a main event. Not only do all of these scenes (save one) take place the end of the day, but they also don’t seem to be going anywhere; they are hollow and uneventful butt ends of a day. I don’t see T.S. Eliot as the sarcastic, sassy type (maybe he is?), but I believe it’s plausible to see sarcasm in the title. These are never-ending preludes to nothingness, to emptiness.

Or maybe the title “Preludes” has a darker message. A line that jumps out is:

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

Somewhat similarly to Prufrock’s “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent”, these streets haunt ominously, waiting to “assume the world”. This could be interpreted as the impending spread of urbanization throughout the world. In a literal sense, these streets will increase in number and riddle their way into domination across the globe; in another sense the “conscience of a blackened street”, aka the morals and values of urban society, will also soon pervade human society.

Well, I’ve spent a characteristically long-winded couple of paragraphs trying to polish Eliot's soiled and stomped-out city.

Do y’all have any thoughts on “Preludes”?