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T.S. Eliot Preludes (1917)


  • cvillelisa
    Feb 26 9:34 AM
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    T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard University, but most of his adult life was passed in London. In the vanguard of the artistic movement known as Modernism, Eliot was a unique innovator in poetry and The Waste Land (1922) stands as one of the most original and influential poems of the twentieth century. As a young man he suffered a religious crisis and a nervous breakdown before regaining his emotional equilibrium and Christian faith. His early poetry, including "Preludes," deals with spiritually exhausted people who exist in the impersonal, tawdry modern city. "Preludes" impressionistically captures the impoverished spiritual lives of those living in a lonely, sordid, decadent culture.

    Eliot was an important literary critic who once observed, "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion. . . ."

    Can one find an "objective correlative " in "Preludes" that results in a specific emotion?

    http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/eliot_preludes.html







    I
    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 chimneypots,
    And at the corner of the street
    A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
    And then the lighting of the lamps.

    II

    The morning comes to consciousness
    Of faint stale smells of beer
    From the sawdust-trampled street
    With all its muddy feet that press
    To early coffee-stands.

    With the other masquerades
    That times resumes,
    One thinks of all the hands
    That are raising dingy shades
    In a thousand furnished rooms.
    III

    You tossed a blanket from the bed
    You lay upon your back, and waited;
    You dozed, and watched the night revealing
    The thousand sordid images
    Of which your soul was constituted;
    They flickered against the ceiling.
    And when all the world came back
    And the light crept up between the shutters
    And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
    You had such a vision of the street
    As the street hardly understands;
    Sitting along the bed's edge, where
    You curled the papers from your hair,
    Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
    In the palms of both soiled hands.
    IV
    His soul stretched tight across the skies
    That fade behind a city block,
    Or trampled by insistent feet
    At four and five and six o'clock;
    And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
    And evening newspapers, and eyes
    Assured of certain certainties,
    The conscience of a blackened street
    Impatient to assume the world.

    I am moved by fancies that are curled
    Around these images, and cling:
    The notion of some infinitely gentle
    Infinitely suffering thing.

    Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
    The worlds revolve like ancient women
    Gathering fuel in vacant lots.





    When I read Eliot, I'm always struck at how modern he really is. That last stanza slays me.



  • just mercedes
    February 26 ↑
    Reply
    I love this poem too, his insistence on the world as it is, and the switching of points of view in the different stanzas, the views of the alienation of man in modern society and his heart-felt identification with this and with them.

    For me, the final three lines of the first stanza have always resonated. Although now dated - we no longer have the horse-drawn carts, or the lamp-lighter - I always think of them when I hear the bus idling at the bus-stop at dusk, when the streetlights come on. This poem shows images of when we feel most alone, most separate from the rest of the world, yet at the same time shows the rest of the world doing the same.

    I read it again only recently, and it was like finding an old friend here! Thanks for posting.

    • cvillelisa
      February 26 ↑
      Reply


      That's just a great analysis that is both personal and scholarly. I'm always so happy that you participate here.

      I find I constantly carry Mr. Eliot around in my head.

  • bowmore bill
    March 2 ↑
    Reply
    I try my best to sheer away from poets like this, from feeling alright, and sometimes quite pleased with myself when i think i have done a nice job, then suddenly darkness decends
    and i just want to give up pretending to be a poet.

  • ca ne fait rien
    March 7 ↑
    Reply

    emotional correlative

    explained
    http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Objective_Correlative.pdf

    Lately I looked up exactly to see what is defined as emotion. It appears different in different places and cultures, but for the purpose of the Eliot analysis, perhaps we should call emotion as basically any kind of feeling.

    Prelude 3
    I always think is the definitive illustration of ennui.

    Prelude 1-
    although it actually says 'lonely' which may influence the feeling- loneliness, emptiness
    are the kind of feelings illustrated by the objects gathered.

    Prelude 2
    Resignation , mechanical repetition. The objective correlation to me here is the very converse of itself- unemotionalism- slightly differnt from the emptiness of Prelude 1 though.

    Prelude 4
    always feels less passive. The suffering is a more tangible emotion. It leads on from the static action of 3 to a more determined effort to take control of the driftingness. Somethign is almost grasped by the action of suffering, and reaching out through the suffering. Traditionally, if I remember rightly, it is interpreted by calling that thing Faith- in Eliot's case a Christian faith, but I think it works for us all (outside of religious significance) today as something to believe in- the flicker of belief that 'yes we can' if you like.

    Eliot takes us through these stages of gradual shifts in emotion through the objective correlation of the shifting urban streetscape from close of day to start of day - the time of relaxation, the time away from the daily grind, but it is as much of a mental grind through life as a physical one- there is no freedom, even in personal space here, until the glimmer at the end. That glimmer that keeps the wheel turning.


    • cvillelisa
      March 7 ↑
      Reply



      Reading that as nearly as good as reading the poems. I will return.

  • iceanddiamonds
    August 13 ↑
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    I always thought he was speaking of images. An image is an "objective correlative": that is, it's not abstract in the sense that a concept such as "time" would be, but the image's physical objectivity signifies or correlates with a signified "specific emotion" such as "time"

    from "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" because it has a good example: "Midnight shakes the memory" would be the specific emotion and its objective correlative would be "As a madman shakes a dead geranium"

    Any image in Preludes works for this it's just not so easily encapsulated, for me at least, into a "specific emotion"/concept, but it's still the same idea.

    • cvillelisa
      August 14 ↑
      Reply



      contemplating. i never really thought of eliot as an imagist ---
      thanks for the thoughts i'll be back
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