Sadness of solitude

The poet, T.S Elliot, lived during World War II. He moved to England from America in 1914 and wrote the poem Prelude. The main idea during this postmodern period is about war. The poet communicated his feelings about his city life in England associated with hopelessness and depression. This is exhibited by literary devices and the changes made by breaking the stanzas.  

T.J Elliot showed that war is cruel and destroys everything throughout the poem by using literary devices such as symbolism and alliteration. T.J Elliot uses the poem to cause us to imagine the depression and darkness in that time. In the poem, Preludes, the word choices he made were generally dark, such as gusty shower wraps and the grimy scraps. This indicates citizens suffered through the harsh life and became poor by the war. “A gusty shower wraps” (Eliot, 5) infers that people predicted the depression would come and it did. “The grimy scraps” (6) implies corpses lining the streets. Moreover, “Withered leaves about your feet” (7) symbolizes the neighborhoods around you are suffering and dying. This is because withered leaves are shattered, and it heralds the arrival of winter, which is not alive and hard for living things. Also, “smells of steaks” (2), “broken blinds” (10), and “steams and stamps” (12) show alliteration and “withered leaves” (7) show assonance. These literary devices maximize the meaning of the theme which is war is extreme and takes away everything. In other words, symbolism represents the subjects and other devices such as alliteration or assonance describe the violence of the war.

          The break made in the poem amplifies the power of the pause. The third stanza elaborates upon a scene of a woman lying restless in bed waiting for sleep to overtake her. The woman in the poem represents everybody and the state of their souls. Here, the tone changes from the more impersonal in stanza two to a more personal in stanza three. When he describes the nasty dreams, she had when she finally went to sleep, he creates a dark image. Instead of explicitly saying that she started to have nightmares, he wrote, “watched the night revealing” (26), to have a more dramatic effect. He also incorporated the word that her soul was made of “a thousand sordid images” (27). He wrote this to express how disgusting her soul was, which is in line with our theme of depression. It seemed that the dark brought negative impressions, but the light took them away. The author used personification when “the light crept up” (31) to make it sound creepier. Even though the light was supposed to take away the negative feelings, it just revealed a more sorrowful scene. The imagery of the paper in our hair, the yellowed soles of our feet, and our soiled hands all paint a horrible day to wake up to. This was the everyday routine of this woman, and it was not very pretty. There was no respite from the horrible world even when falling asleep; suffering just comes in the form of nightmares. The different words the author uses in the stanzas makes it seem that both our minds and bodies have been defiled, and there is no way to avoid it.  The third stanza elaborates upon a scene of a woman laying restless in bed waiting for sleep to overtake her. The woman in the poem represents everybody and the state of their souls. Here, the tone changes from the more impersonal tone in stanza two to a more personal tone in stanza three. He creates a dark image when he describes the dirty dreams she had when she finally went to sleep. Instead of explicitly saying that she started to have nightmares, he wrote, “watched the night revealing” (26), to have a more artistic effect. He also incorporated the word that her soul was made of “a thousand sordid images” (27). He wrote this to express how disgusting her soul was, which is in line with our theme of depression. It seemed that the dark brought negative things, but the light took them away. The author used personification when “the light crept up” (31) to make it sound creepier. Even though the light was supposed to take away the negative feelings, it just revealed a more sorrowful scene. The imagery of the paper in our hair, the yellowed soles of our feet, and our soiled hands all paint a horrible day to wake up to. This was the everyday routine of this woman, and it was not very pretty. There was no respite from the horrible world even when falling asleep; suffering just comes in the form of nightmares. The words the author uses in the third stanza makes it seem that both our minds and bodies have been defiled, and there is no way to avoid it.

In addition, stanza four switches back to a third person perspective of the street and the scene. The author describes a soul being stretched across the fading sky and trampled on the ground by people’s feet. The author creates this image of the man’s soul to represent the fact that his soul was fading, and everybody is too busy to pay any attention to it. These specific words like “fading sky” and “trampled by insistent feet” create a concrete image of this soul. Eliot uses the soul to set up an emotional connection between the reader and his theme. This causes people to think emotionally about what is happening in everybody’s everyday life. We then get more unpleasant imagery in the next few lines focusing on specific body parts doing everyday things such as “fingers stuffing pipes” (43) and “eyes assured of certain certainties” (44-45). Eliot repeats the symbol of newspapers in line 44, reminding us of the dirtiness that we cannot escape. In the last few lines of the poem, the author switches back to a first-person perspective. He then repeats the idea that time is always repeating itself when he writes, “The worlds revolve”. Despite this dreary outlook on life, Eliot tells us, the reader, to “Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh” (52). He wants the readers to think about what makes the most of life, even if the streets, our mind, and our body might be dirtied and even if things never really change. Therefore, the change variation from stanza two to three makes the readers think about the meaning of loss and death.

In conclusion, the poet uses literary devices such as symbolism, imagery, and changes in tone to express the dark situation during this period. Eliot brilliantly wrote a poem that highlighted the problems our society had: being too busy with everyday life and not paying attention to the darkness in our souls.  In addition, he utilized a framed composition which mentioned the story in her dream. These factors were used to emphasize a theme and to communicate that everyone who lived at that time was depressed and extremely busy with everyday duties to notice it. According to the poet, the reason why people were exhausted was the war and the industrial revolution. The poet, T.S Elliot, lived during World War II. He moved to England from America in 1914 and wrote the poem Prelude. The main idea during this postmodern period is about war. The poet communicated his feelings about his city life in England associated with hopelessness and depression. This is exhibited by literary devices and the changes made by breaking the stanzas.  

“Preludes”, Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44214/prelude56d22338dc954 .April 23. 2019

“Preludes Introduction”, Shmoop. https://www.shmoop.com/preludes/ April 25. 2019