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.”
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.
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.
