21 pages • 42 minutes read
T. S. EliotPreludes
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1917A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Drabness and Isolation of City Life
The poem does not show any individuals interacting with each other; there are no snatches of overheard conversation, no gestures of affection or friendship. These people all live close to each other but seem separate and isolated, wrapped up in their own world. “Preludes” thus explores the modern urban experience as one of isolation and alienation between people.
The people move as part of a mass group, lacking individuality or even full personhood, since only parts of them are referred to—feet, hands, fingers, eyes. In referring to them only by isolated body parts, the narrator denies them any distinct personalities or appearances—they are essentially anonymous. The repeated invocation of “hands” alludes to manual labor, emphasizing that the inhabitants belong to the lower class and are engaged in physically demanding and repetitive work. The buildings in which they live are drab, cheerless, dilapidated places that seem to reflect the colorless lives of their occupants. The shades that cover the windows are “dingy” (Line 26) and the blinds are “broken” (Line 10), which speaks of a general poverty in the neighborhood. The houses, like the people the narrator observes, are all alike. The lack of distinction between houses thus serves to reinforce the idea of uniformity and alienation in the urban environment, with everything blending together instead of offering sights or people that are unique and striking.
The street itself adds to the grimness of the surroundings. It is wet, windswept, and bleak on this winter evening and muddy in the morning. It is also littered with the “grimy scraps / Of withered leaves” (Lines 6-7) and newspapers blown over from “vacant lots” (Line 8). The amount of litter and dirt suggests that the neighborhood is not well-kept and that there is little of beauty of novelty on display, reinforcing the sense that the inhabitants do not have anything pleasant in their surroundings to cheer or inspire them. In the midst of such poverty and drabness, even the cab-horse is described as “lonely” (Line 12), which suggests that even nonhuman life has become affected by the sense of alienation.
In these hopeless surroundings, even “[t]he conscience of a blackened street” (Line 46) struggles to assert itself. The narrator suggests that, consumed by the struggles of their daily lives, the inhabitants cannot hope to develop consciousness of anything more abstract or beautiful than what is right in front of them, thereby making genuine human connection and deeper experiences all but impossible in such a bleak urban landscape.
The Experience of Time
“Preludes” explores the experience of time for the city’s inhabitants. In doing so, it creates a subtle examination of the deadening effects of routine and mechanized time and labor upon the modern urban populace, who find their lives strictly regimented and lacking in a more spontaneous, abstract sense of time.
The narrator frequently notes the passing of time and the particular time of day. This is emphasized near the beginning, when the time of day makes up an entire line: “Six o’clock” (Line 3). Part I thus takes place in the early evening. Part II is set in the morning, Part III in both night and morning, and then Part IV circles back to where the poem began, with the specific mention of “four and five and six o’clock” (Line 42) in the evening. The regular passing of time controls the lives of the people on the street who live in tenement buildings. They follow a strict, repetitive routine governed by the clock, and there seems to be no escape from it. It is the unchanging reality of their daily lives. They return from work at the same time every day, cook dinner at the same time, raise the window shades in their rooms when morning comes, go off to work at the same time, come home at the same time, and then light their pipes and read the evening newspaper. They have no freedom and they accept things as they are, as if there were no alternative. The rigid schedule of their lives contributes to the sense of anonymity and drabness in their urban existence.
However, in Part II the narrator describes time as a “masquerade” (Line 19). A masquerade is a false appearance, an illusion. The monotony of clock-time may appear to have a rigid hold on the people of the street, but the power it has over them is not, the poem implies, absolute or inevitable. It is in fact man-made; a consequence of a certain way society has chosen to organize itself due to the effects of modern industrialization. The narrator depicts this “masquerade” as having a numbing effect upon the populace, who develop a lack of vision and imagination, feeling only “[a]ssured of certain certainties” (Line 45) as they read their newspapers. Their daily habits and routines dull their minds with the familiar rather than challenging them to live more fully, therefore suggesting that the way people experience time has a direct effect upon how they live and what they value.
The Power of Visions
Despite the bleak, stunted lives of those who live in the street, the speaker presents several moments in which that dispiriting reality is momentarily transcended and a new vision of life appears. In doing so, the poem celebrates the power of visions to transcend even the most monotonous and uninspiring of existences.
The first of these moments comes in Part III. The woman dozes the night away observing the “thousand sordid images” (Line 27) that make up her “soul” (Line 28) projected onto the ceiling. However, then something else happens, quite unexpectedly, as dawn comes: “You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands” (Lines 33-34). The nature of this vision is never explained in detail; it may lie beyond the woman’s ability to express it. It is apparent, though, that suddenly she sees everything in a new light that wipes out the previous reality. It is a different understanding of life—something that ennobles the people of the street in ways that they cannot see. However, the woman appears to have no desire to proclaim it or act on it; she just sits on the bed taking the curlers out of her hair, a very mundane image.
The next moment of vision, which comes in Part IV, is quite different in that it suggests an urgent desire for some kind of action. It is connected to the image of a man whose “soul stretched tight across the skies” (Line 39). This expansive image, which puts in mind the crucified Christ, is in stark contrast to the sense of restriction and regimentation that occurs elsewhere in the poem. This man appears to have some message that he wants the street to absorb; he wants to be its “conscience” (Line 46)—to act as the people’s guardian or guide, lifting them to a deeper understanding of their lives.
In the second stanza of Part IV, the speaker feels the impact of this and other images in the poem, which put into his mind “[t]he notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing” (Lines 50-51). The word “infinitely” comes as a surprise in this poem about finite limitations, in which everything seems constrained by time and conditioned by habit. Nevertheless, the concept of infinity has also been prepared for with the image of the soul stretched across the sky, since the sky, as far as the human eye is concerned, stretches to infinity.
The vision presented here, then, including the speaker’s interpretation of it, suggests that human life involves an infinity of suffering, which is endured by beings whose essential nature is gentle. This suggests a certain dignity and humbleness with which people endure their destiny, inviting feelings of compassion. For this moment, the speaker is able to see deeper into the human condition, finding beauty and transcendence even in an environment that is ostensibly hopeless and drab.
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