T. S. Eliot


EXPLORING Preludes


‘Preludes’ was written between 1910 and 1911. It was originally written as four different poems set in three different cities, and this explains the fragmented nature of this deeply despairing poem. To understand the desolation of the poem, the cultural context which Eliot both illuminates and criticises should be considered. The Industrial Revolution had meant a rapid increase in population, construction and infrastructure in urban centres. Factories and housing were built at an unsustainable pace, and cities were poorly planned out. London had a population of about seven million in 1911, but the city had never been designed for that many people. Houses were divided into  ugly and hopeless. In ‘Preludes’, he paints a grim picture of the disparate lives that might be lived in such a city.


PART I


‘The winter evening settles down/ With smell of steaks in passageways./ Six o’clock.’  of winter and the use of the soothing verb ‘settles’ could make us construe the setting as agreeable. It is a winter evening, people are home from work and in from the cold, and dinner is being prepared. For many of us, this is a special time of day, a chance to reconnect with loved ones and share a meal together. But from line four onwards, a disheartening tone is established. Eliot grimly calls this time ‘The burnt-out ends of smoky days.’ Alliteration and assonance emphasise the bleak setting: ‘And now a gusty shower wraps/ The grimy scraps/ Of withered leaves about your feet’. The alliteration of ‘broken blinds’ in line ten draws our attention to the ramshackle nature of the city, while the ‘chimney-pots’ remind us of smog and pollution. Even the image of the horse, an animal so often used to connote beauty, is a gloomy one: ‘And at the corner of the street/ A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.’ The use of sibilance emphasises the coldness and uneasiness of the evening, with the horse’s breath visible in the air and the stamping hooves showing its eagerness to get away from this place.


The alliterative last line is set apart from the rest of Part I: ‘And then the lighting of the lamps.’ Light is often used as a symbol of hope, and this could be a lovely image, especially considering the picturesque gas lights. However, Parts II and III suggest that nights in the city are sleazy and sordid.


PART II


 as coming ‘to consciousness’, which makes it sound like someone coming to after an operation or waking up after a night of drinking: ‘faint stale smells of beer/ From the sawdust-trampled street.’ The sawdust was scattered to soak up the dirt of the streets and the ‘muddy feet that press/ To early coffee-stands’. Something that many of us would consider a pleasant treat in the morning, a takeaway coffee, is another thing that


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL 147


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