In the second stanza, Eliot writes “faint smells of beer / From the sawdust-trampled street / With all its muddy feet that press / To early coffee stands.” These four lines sound like a monotonous city routine, where people go out at night and have to be at work the next morning and so to cure their hangovers they go to coffee stands. This is a typically English routine, where the “muddy feet that press” is a pressing image. By using “sawdust-trampled feet” suggests cleaning as sawdust is often used to soak up mess, and this mess in Eliot’s writing could be the city’s sordid aspects.
Sordid aspects of city life are presented to us in the third stanza. The stanza sticks out from the rest of the poem because it is so different and shocking. This may have been Eliot’s intent; to shock people and to enlighten them with images of what happens in cities when people have gone home for the night. Eliot starts the stanza with “You tossed a blanket from the bed / You lay upon your back, and waited.” These two lines are of a sexual nature and we almost get the impression that Eliot is talking about a prostitute. We must also notice that this stanza is also written in the second person, which is more personal than the other stanzas. In the next few lines it seems as if the narrator feels pity for the woman as she has sold her soul and can see exactly what she has done when she sees the flickering images. “The thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted; / They flickered against the ceiling.” These few lines could stem from the beliefs of Henri Bergson, a French philosopher who influenced Eliot. Bergson believed that the soul was formed by memories of images projected onto the passive mind as film.
At the end of the third stanza, we see a technique common to Eliot’s writing, focusing on body parts; “You curled the papers from your hair, / Or clasped the yellow soles of feet / In the palms of both soiled hands.” The image “clasped the yellow soles of feet” is a vulnerable, foetal image. The tenderness of these lines can show the need to be protected from the city. In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ yellow is also used to describe a city scene. “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes.” The language possesses beautiful ideas but presented by ugly imagery. The use of “yellow” also suggests illness.
The fourth stanza of ‘Preludes’ begins with the lines “His souls stretched tight across the skies / That fade behind a city block.” Here, Eliot talks about the soul again, which is linked to the earlier line “of which your soul was constituted” as well as a line from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table.” The sky is seen as a perfect, untouchable image above the city scenes below, and the use of sibilance in the line “his souls stretched tight across the skies” sounds as if the line is whispered and unheard in the bustle of the city.
The lines “the conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world” suggest darkness. The use of “blackened street” suggests smog and night images, and “impatient to assume the world” makes us question what is behind the streets of the city.
‘Preludes’ concludes with “Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; / The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.” These three lines are written in a different tone to the rest of the poem, and the language lacks elegance. The imagery of “wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh” is vulgar and provokes images of dirty people laughing in dark back streets of the city, which is a threatening image. The sounds of the words are harsh; “wipe..hand..laugh” mirroring the harsh world which the city is. “The worlds revolve…” suggests that in cities people are living in their own different worlds, behind “masquerades”, which is a theme also present in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ with the line “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
In ‘Preludes’ and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Eliot illuminates the modern city in a very harsh light. Eliot seems to focus on the negative points of the city such as its darkness, loneliness and how threatening it can be. This could be due to the fact that Eliot was writing about these city themes after Darwinism, and just before World War One, when the city and civilisation were seen as the things which would eventually destroy man. Eliot discusses the theme of the modern city truthfully and writes about it in the stark way in which he views it.
Becky Harris 12G2
(1,152 words)
