Preludes

T.S.Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was one of the greatest poet of twentieth century literary world. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A to Henry Ware (a businessman) and Charlotte Stearns Eliot (a poetess). Eliot's family was from a very influential ancestral root in England. So he got the best of educations from Smith Academy in St. Louis (grammar school), Milton Academy in Massachusetts (secondary school) and Harvard University. Her was a very bright student. In 1915 Eliot married to his girlfriend Vivienne in England and settled there. However his marriage was troubled. Vivienne died in the year 1945 due to both physical and mental illness. Eliot married to Valerie Fletcher in the year 1957 which was a happy union. Eliot was into different kinds of profession during his lifetime. His occupations varied from schoolmaster, bank clerk, free-lance writer, assistant editor of “the Egoist” (1917-19), editor of the “Criterion” (1922-39), publisher and director (Faber and Faber) 1925 and even professor of poetry at Harvard. 

Eliot was an introvert and religious kind of person. For a reverent inner call in 1927 he joined the Anglican church as a member. His inclination towards spiritualism is profoundly visible in his poetry. 

Eliot's early poetical works-Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922)-express the anguish and barrenness of modern life and the isolation of the individual, particularly as reflected in the failure of love. His complex early poems, employing myths, religious symbolism, and literary allusion, signified a break with 19th-century poetic traditions. "Preludes" is a poem written in early part of his poetic life. It is a combination of four poems which portrays the morbidity, monotony and solitariness of modern life. Eliot was an extraordinarily influential critic, rejecting Romantic notions of unfettered originality and arguing for the impersonality of great art. His later criticism attempts to support Christian culture against what he saw as the empty and fragmented values of secularism. His outstanding critical works are contained in such volumes as The Sacred Wood (1920),For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Elizabethan Essays (1934), Essays Ancient and Modern (1936), and Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948). He was awarded Noble Prize in literature in the year 1948.

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 chimney-pots, 

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 time 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.