T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes” are a series of four portraits of a city. The first and last portraits take place in the evening when the world settles down and the middle portraits take place in the morning and evening when the world is just waking or quieting down. It is interesting to note that Eliot prefers the beginning and ends of the day as his subject as opposed to the middle of the day. I notice that most of my poems take place in the morning or at night. Perhaps these are times when we are less busy and therefore more aesthetically attuned to our environment. In any case, Eliot shows that he is not very interested in what ordinary city people actually do during an average day. In this poem Eliot speaks of the alienation of urban people from their environment and from their world.
Eliot’s first portrait is of an urban setting on a winter’s evening that is at once calming and melancholy. In the first four lines of the poem the reader gets a sense that a long day is over (the winter evening settles down; the burnt-out ends of smoky days) bringing with in the comforting smells of “steaks in passageways”. A gusty shower comes, perhaps to extinguish the fire of the day and clear the smoke. The reader also gets a sense that the evening brings loneliness and desolation (broken blinds, grimy scraps of withered leaves, a lonely cab-horse). And at the end the reader senses a slight hint of hope with the “lighting of the lamps”.
The subject of the second stanza is the morning. The morning is personified and “comes to consciousness”. Here there is some ambiguity. Does the morning coming to consciousness of itself? Does the morning come to someone’s consciousness? Or, is it some mixture of the two? I think the ambiguity is intentional. We are supposed to think that the morning has its own kind of consciousness, but this consciousness is ultimately dependent upon our own. The morning comes to consciousness by virtue of sensory objects such as the smell of beer from the street and all the people who head off to coffee stands and go about their daily business (the other masquerades/That time resumes). Apparently, Eliot does not hold everyday goings-on in high esteem and thinks them inauthentic. In the last three lines Eliot considers the people who become conscious of the world and who raise dingy shades to look out at the world from their furnished rooms (i.e. their own little worlds).
The third stanza is written in the second person. The ‘you’ in question arose from his/her dreams (The thousand sordid images/of which your soul was constituted). When we arise from our dreams and come back to consciousness we rejoin the world which is, itself, coming back to consciousness. But an individual’s consciousness of the world is different from the world’s own consciousness. (You had such a vision of the street/As the street hardly understands).
The subject of the fourth stanza initially speaks of a male figure, who is perhaps the world personified. He is stretched across the sky or trampled by people coming home from work “at four, five and six o’clock”. The world sees people going about their business, stuffing pipes, carrying newspapers, etc. These people see the world as something certain and predictable; they are too often ready to assume a world.
In the fifth stanza Eliot switches to the first person and praises the imagination which is able to weave daily images into something meaningful and worthy of our humanity (The notion of some infinitely gentle/infinitely suffering thing). Is Eliot describing the poet, who through his words and images can remind us of our humanity? The poet is a remedy for the bleak and mundane.
In the final stanza Eliot speaks in the imperative mood as if telling us the moral of what has come before. (Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh) I’m not sure what Eliot means by wiping your hand across your mouth. This gesture could mean many things. I sense that he’s telling us to grimace and laugh at our situation. The world is a collection of worlds that revolve like very old women gathering fuel (newspapers?) in vacant lots. In other words, in a place such as the one Eliot describes the days move cyclically and without much apparent meaning.
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