T. S. Eliot has written some of the literary world's most horrid descriptions of city life. The horror is, however, in the mind of the beholder as it is with beauty.
In his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes, “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” The poet is not necessarily the same as the speaker of his poem—just as the playwright does not have to be a murderer to create a murderer in a play.
Eliot’s “Preludes” consists of four uneven parts: Part I has 13 lines with an uneven rime scheme. Part II has 10 lines, again with an uneven rime scheme. Part III and IV both have 16 lines, but again with uneven rimes and fewer rimes than Parts I and II. The haphazard rimes parallel the speaker’s stream-of-consciousness remarks.
Part I: “The winter evening settles down”
The speaker is describing what he sees as “[t]he winter evening settles down.” He also lets his readers smell what he smells, the odor of “steaks in passageways.” It is the dinner hour, “six o’clock.” He colorfully describes the end of the day as “burnt-out ends of smoky days,” likening the end of the day to the butt of a cigarette.
The reader might recall in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” how the speaker describes evening as “a patient etherised upon a table.” Such an attitude toward evening signifies loneliness and melancholy.
Then, a rainstorm blows up: “now a gusty shower wraps / The grimy scraps.” “Grimy scraps” indicates the ugliness of the speaker’s surroundings, as do other images in the rest of the stanza: “withered leaves” at his feet, “newspapers from vacant lots,” and then he notices “A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.” Is the cab-horse really “lonely” or is the speaker projecting his own feelings onto the animal?
Part II: “The morning comes to consciousness”
In part II, the speaker is waking up the next morning, again he allows the reader to see, hear, and smell the same things he experiences: “stale smells of beer / From the sawdust-trampled street / With all its muddy feet that press.”
He says that all those muddy feet are trampling to the “early coffee-stands” and other places that pretend to be important for that time of morning. And he even tells the reader what this time of morning brings to his mind: “One thinks of all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms.”
Part III: “You tossed a blanket from the bed”
Part III is dedicated to looking back to the night before, when the speaker turned down his covers, got into bed, and had some trouble falling asleep: as he dozed, “the thousand sordid images” kept blowing through his mind. Then morning came and he sat on the edge of his bed, bent over and stretched by grasping his feet with his dirty hands.
Part IV: “His soul stretched tight across the skies”
In part IV, the speaker refers to himself in the third person, “His soul stretched tight across the skies,” in the first person, “I am moved by fancies that are curled,” and then the second person as he did earlier in the poem, “Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh.”
Again, he peppers his narrative with ugly images, “short square fingers stuffing pipes,” and “[t]he conscience of a blackened street.” Finally, he concludes by referring to “The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.”
The speaker has been implying all along that his own soul is this “ infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing,” which is being stifled by all the ugliness in his environment. All he can do is frame the ugliness into images that may report his ultimate understanding, which is superior to others: “You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands.”
