Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Deconstructing the City

© Linda Sue Grimes

Sep 19, 2007
Where Eliot Worked, Wikimedia Commons
The wildly famous show tune "Memory" by Andrew Lloyd Webber was inspired by T. S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and "Preludes." This article analyzes the former.

T. S. Eliot is also a September poet, born September 26, 1888.

The speaker of T. S. Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” goes for a four-hour walk at midnight in the city. The poem consists of 78 lines contained in eight verse paragraphs. Rime is sporadic as is rhythm, and the theme is mocking desecration of the city coupled with drunken fantasy.

First Verse Paragraph

In the first verse paragraph, the speaker reports that it is “Twelve o’clock.” He dramatizes his walk through the streets, describing what he sees: “Along the reaches of the street / Held in a lunar synthesis.” The “lunar synthesis” is the important backdrop for the streetscape. The moon is “Whispering lunar incantations” that “Dissolve the floors of memory.” The speaker is finding his ability to remember where he is a bit difficult; the reader might suspect that the speaker is considerably inebriated.

The drunken portrayal of the street lamps offers further evidence that the speaker is possibly so drunk that his thoughts and memories are misaligned: “Every street lamp that I pass / Beats like a fatalistic drum.” It’s no doubt the speaker’s head that is beating like the “fatalistic drum.” Then the speaker offers the hilarious image: “And through the spaces of the dark / Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium.” The intoxicated speaker’s memory is being shaken by midnight, and it is like a “madman” shaking a “dead geranium.”

Second Verse Paragraph

By the second verse paragraph, the speaker has been walking for an hour and half. The reader is treated to one of the sporadic rimes that pop up occasionally: “The street lamp sputtered, / The street lamp muttered.”

The speaker encounters another person out walking, and the street lamp tells him to look at her. She’s likely a prostitute whose “dress / Is torn and stained with sand.” The speaker’s mind again is strangely interpreting things as he sees “the corner of her eye / Twists like a crooked pin." But then it’s the street lamp that says all this, so one cannot place all the blame on the speaker for reporting such gibberish.

Third Verse Paragraph

The third verse paragraph merely reports that his memory is throwing “up high and dry / A crowd of twisted things” and then cites examples of twisted things, such as “a twisted branch upon the beach.” This line alerts the reader that the speaker is walking in a coastal city.

Fourth Verse Paragraph

It’s now “Half-past two”; the street lamp is talking again: “"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, / Slips out its tongue / And devours a morsel of rancid butter." The image of a cat eating rancid butter is set in another sporadic rime. Then the speaker reports seeing a street urchin, and a crab that grabs a stick.

Fifth Verse Paragraph

It’s half-past three, time for another sporadic rime: “The lamp sputtered, / The lamp muttered in the dark.”

Sixth Verse Paragraph

The street lamp now speaks French, as it describes the moon, telling the speaker that “La lune ne garde aucune rancune”: the moon never holds a grudge. The moon lights the corners of memory, and even though the “moon has lost her memory,” the speaker remembers grotesque smells he has experienced.

Seventh and Eight Verse Paragraphs

It’s now four o’clock and the speaker has arrived at this flat. He sees the number and remembers that it is his. He has the key, which becomes a knife, as the finishes his dramatic reportage with a flourish, which actually appears in the eighth verse paragraph: “The last twist of the knife,” which rimes with the preceding line, “Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”

*****

Another T. S. Eliot article:

Prufrock’s Love Song: A Funny Poem


The copyright of the article Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night in American Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.


Where Eliot Worked, Wikimedia Commons
       


Post this Article to facebook Add this Article to del.icio.us! Digg this Article furl this Article Add this Article to Reddit Add this Article to Technorati Add this Article to Newsvine Add this Article to Windows Live Add this Article to Yahoo Add this Article to StumbleUpon Add this Article to BlinkLists Add this Article to Spurl Add this Article to Google Add this Article to Ask Add this Article to Squidoo

Comments
Nov 27, 2008 6:23 PM
Guest :
Memory is made up of little details that we pull together into coherent thoughts. These are the "divisions and precisions" and the "clear relations" of stanza 1. The speaker is finding he memory warped by the night and the moon. Anyone who has tried to hold a conversation at 3am will understand the feeling. And as is suggested above, the speaker seems pretty drunk. But it is the moon that gets the blame for dissolving "the floors of memory" and plunging the speaker into a series of random images, seen or remembered. It is significant that the moon is often a symbol of madness and here is compared to a madman shaking a dead geranium. So we understand that the "lunar synthesis" ie, the moon's putting together of all the divers parts of memory, is not going to be coherent or logical at all.

There is a great sadness in this poem with respect to the inevitablity of our actions. The speaker feels the street lamps marking out a beat like a "fatalistic drum". It is inevitable that he will end up where he always ends up, home in bed. The street lamps become agents of fate, depriving the speaker of the true ability to choose his own actions. The street lamps create pools of light which force the speaker to see particular images, the first being the women in the door. The lamp uses the imperative "Regard that women", reflecting the inability of the speaker to ignore what is highlighted by the streetlamps against the darkness inhabited by memory, though even memory here not entirely under his control, as its constitute parts have been turned into a "lunar synthesis" rather than the synthesis of the speaker himself.

This is not necessarily as coastal city, as suggested above. It is the memory that "throws up...a twisted branch upon the beach". It may be just a memory of the speaker. The maritime connection may simply be a continuation of the "high and dry" metaphor. The idea is that the memory is pulling up odd images of things with little connection to each other, and these things become stranded uselessly in the subconscious, like flotsam from a shipwreck stranded broken and useless on a beach, or unidentifiable pieces of factory equipment left to rust without purpose.

The "cat which flattens itself in the gutter, Slips out a tongue And devours a morsel of rancid butter" is an image the street lamp points out, where as the child grabbing the toy and the crab are memories. All are examples of automatic actions, things done without true free will.
Nov 27, 2008 6:41 PM
Guest :
There is "nothing behind that child's eye" because there was no thought behind the action. In the same way, the crab, though old and so theorectically, wise, grabs the stick uselessly because it's a automatic response.

The moon is described like an old senile woman. There is no malice is her messing with the speaker's memory. "La lune ne garde aucune rancune" The moon doesn't keep any grudges. She herself has lost her memory, just as she destroys the speaker's memory. Instead she just sits enternally passive, while the "old noturnal smells..cross and cross across her brain." This continues the idea of inevitability, as we are given the idea that the moon is ancient and every night watches the same things happen again and again, without ever stringing them together into memories "divisions and precisions". The lamps description of the moon prompts the speaker also to recall snapshot images and fleeting smells of his life, but these have no connection to each other. He is still under the influence of the "lunar synthesis", meaning the daytime order of things is absent and he is left with a random collection of mental images.

The speaker finally gets him memory back when he sees his front door. But it is important to note that the lamp is still issuing him with orders, telling him what to do "Mount" the steps "Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life." There is no choice for the speaker. He is following the fatalistic leanings of the street lamps still.

The street lamps suggest time and the daily routine. This association is shown by the way they beat "like a fatalistic drum", keeping time, and also because the lighting and extinguishing of lamps marks the passage of day into night and so represents the daily order and routine of the world. This is strengthened by the time markers that appear in the poem, "Midnight" "Half-past one," etc The speaker is not being swept along by the routine of things, personified by the streetlamps. Like the cat, his are a series of automatic actions. This is "the last twist of the knife" - the realisation that he is back where he started, at home, in bed, prepared to repeat the whole dull experience that is life again the next day. He is pained by the thought of once again sinking bad into his world of automatum. The moon's special, remix of memory allows him to glimpse this idea when his usual restrictions and precisions of memory disappear and new thoughts are created out of old memories.
2 Comments