suggests that Eliot believes she has been irrevocably damaged by life. There is no compassion or hope of redemption in this portrait. Even as morning breaks and the  the speaker quickly returns to hopelessness with his tragic picture of the woman sitting on the edge of her bed, removing her paper curlers or holding her feet – yellowed with calloused skin and cracked heels – with dirty hands. There is something poignant in the lines: ‘You had such a vision of the street/ As the street hardly understands’. The speaker is acknowledging that because of the woman’s line of work and the place in which she lives, she understands the street, city and people in a way that no one else could.


PART IV


Part IV introduces us to another city-dweller, someone whose soul is ‘stretched tight across the skies/ That fade behind a city block’. This strange and compelling image seems to suggest that this man, like the woman in the previous section, suffers both physically and emotionally from living in the squalid city. The speaker might even be the city itself, suffering by being ‘trampled by insistent feet’ of the city-dwellers returning home. Perhaps he is describing the rich factory owners:  There seems to be a kind of consciousness embedded in the city: ‘The conscience of a blackened street/ Impatient to assume the world.’ There is something quite de-humanising about these images: there is no sense of the individual, but rather just a collective, heaving mass of humanity.


The penultimate stanza is different from the rest of this poem. The speaker has a sense ‘I am moved by fancies   This tender beauty is completely annihilated by the closing lines, with yet more images of desolation and despair: ‘Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;/ The worlds revolve like ancient women/ Gathering fuel in vacant lots.’ The ‘you’ who crudely wipes their hand across their mouth and dismissively laughs at the speaker’s notion, and the old women gathering debris in empty waste ground, is a suitably bleak ending to this nightmarish vision of urban life.


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL


149


T. S. Eliot


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