Sunday, June 29, 2014

what does the last stanza of TS eliot's poem "preludes" mean?the images,mood and the final message

Part IV  of Eliot's poem Preludes
re-introduces the evening from the first part and the soul from the third. It
 connects the images and themes from the previous sections together. The soul
''stretched tight across the skies'' may or may not be the same soul from the previous
section. All souls in this metropolis are sordid and troubled as that of the
streetwalker in section III.. This time, the soul is not projected on a finite ceiling,
but on the infinite skies, which ''fade behind a city block'', thus ironically losing
its cosmic infinitude,  or it is ''trampled by insistent feet'' which are another
variant of the 'muddy feet' pressing for coffee in section II. As in the first stanza,
the time is mentioned, but it is no precise ''six o'clock''. It no longer matters
exactly what time it is, for it is all the same,the same things happening each day, each
time, to each fragmented part of the fractured urban lifescape. The isolated fingers are
stuffing pipes, to add more smoke and filth to the already obscured reality. The
newspapers from section I return, ending up as ''newspapers from vacant lots'' to be
wrapped by gusty winds around the feet. The eyes can not discern reality and read
certainty.The street is blackened and obscured by soot and grime, and the street, like
the eyes, is ''impatient to assume the world''. 

In the second stanza
of Prelude IV, the narrator is heard for the first time speaking in
the first person. There is a glimpse of hope that something positive can come out of all
this filth and squalor. The narrator is moved by fancies that curl and cling like smoke
around these 'images', and he can almost see something beyond the squalor, something
Christ-like, the glimpse of the saviour. However, he can go no further; he and the
reader are forced back to the false reality described throughout the poem. The vacant
lot from the first section is here again, with the worlds compared  to old women
collecting fuel rotating, as it were, in the earth's diurnal round. The 'infinitely
gentle/Infinitely suffering thing' is only an illusion.

No comments:

Post a Comment

What accomplishments did Bill Clinton have as president?

Of course, Bill Clinton's presidency will be most clearly remembered for the fact that he was only the second president ever...