TS Eliot - Preludes, Pt 1
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.
I always think the success of this owes much to 'wraps' and 'beats' - one-syllable, present-simple verbs which make for a dull, insistent rhythmn. These words describe motion and it's important that they are at the end of a line, wending (or wrapping) their way into the next. Eliot presents a world teeming with motion but it's not the kind of action you can create, participate in or derive pleasure or meaning from. Stuff happens with no input from anyone. The 'gusty shower' (subejct) wraps newspapers and leaves (object) around 'your feet' (indirect object). Note, people are so unimportant they play second fiddle to leaves and are not even visible. Otherwise we would have 'A gusty shower wraps withered leaves about *you*'. I've always been a fan of TS Eliot (but not of The Wasteland).
This is a great poem. It's sensory and visual with great imagery. But a street scene devoid of people is a bit eerie and the whole thing smacks of desolation ('withered', 'grimy', 'vacant', 'broken', 'burnt out'). It's no surprise, with this as his output, that enviroment/atmosphere was such a bit deal for Eliot. He came up with the term 'objective correlative' in an essay on Hamlet which I will get around to writing about one day in another post. But, back to this poem - I feel sure he wrote it in London!
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.
I always think the success of this owes much to 'wraps' and 'beats' - one-syllable, present-simple verbs which make for a dull, insistent rhythmn. These words describe motion and it's important that they are at the end of a line, wending (or wrapping) their way into the next. Eliot presents a world teeming with motion but it's not the kind of action you can create, participate in or derive pleasure or meaning from. Stuff happens with no input from anyone. The 'gusty shower' (subejct) wraps newspapers and leaves (object) around 'your feet' (indirect object). Note, people are so unimportant they play second fiddle to leaves and are not even visible. Otherwise we would have 'A gusty shower wraps withered leaves about *you*'. I've always been a fan of TS Eliot (but not of The Wasteland).
This is a great poem. It's sensory and visual with great imagery. But a street scene devoid of people is a bit eerie and the whole thing smacks of desolation ('withered', 'grimy', 'vacant', 'broken', 'burnt out'). It's no surprise, with this as his output, that enviroment/atmosphere was such a bit deal for Eliot. He came up with the term 'objective correlative' in an essay on Hamlet which I will get around to writing about one day in another post. But, back to this poem - I feel sure he wrote it in London!
