21 pages • 42 minutes read
Preludes
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” by T. S. Eliot (1915)
Along with “Preludes,” this poem was published in July 1915 in the periodical Blast. It is set in an unnamed city at night. The speaker walks the streets for hours while the moon casts a spell that disrupts the linear world of clock time. As a result, many fragmented, disconnected memories pop up in the speaker’s mind. It is apparent that he lives in a meaningless world that lacks joy, purpose, and human connection, much like the urban landscape in “Preludes.”
“The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’” by T. S. Eliot (1915)
Reading the evening newspaper is one of the habits that the dull people in “Preludes” indulge in, and this poem from the same period in Eliot’s work presents a similar idea, although it takes place in a more upscale neighborhood. Evening comes on in the street, “[w]akening the appetites in some / And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript.” In other words, those who sit in their homes reading the newspaper are not fully alive; passively reading about current events and the lives of others does nothing to enhance the flow of life in them.
“Morning at the Window” by T. S. Eliot (1917)
This is another of Eliot’s early city poems. Like “Preludes,” it presents a bleak portrait. A first-person speaker looks out of a window as the city comes alive in the morning. People are preparing breakfast in their kitchens, and despondent housemaids appear in the streets on their way to their jobs. It is foggy and the narrator watches the “twisted faces” of passersby; one woman smiles aimlessly.
Further Literary Resources
“A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Preludes’” by Oliver Tearle
In this essay, Tearle offers a thought-provoking examination of the poem. Among other points, Tearle remarks that Line 39 of “Preludes,” “His soul stretched tight across the skies” is a peculiar image and argues that it represents the sunset. Tearle also comments that the French poet Charles Baudelaire taught Eliot how to depict in images the grimmer aspects of city life (See: Background). Eliot’s unglamorous presentation of the modern world, Tearle asserts, “is partly what helps to make him a modern poet, focusing on urban social alienation and the landscape of the city rather than on nature and the pastoral.”
T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life by Lyndall Gordon (1998)
This in-depth biography garnered excellent reviews. Gordon accepts the usual portrait of Eliot as a very flawed individual but also, while acknowledging his misogyny and antisemitism, presents him as a complex figure who yearned for spiritual experience and sought perfection in his work. Gordon offers many close readings of the poems. Regarding “Preludes,” she notes that when Eliot explored Roxbury, the Boston slum, “he went in search of squalor, but found it as life-destroying as the well-to-do Boston squares. He was repelled by smells and depressed by slums.” Gordon also observes that the third section of “Preludes” contains the “rather improbable thoughts of a grimy woman in curl papers.” The woman projects images from “her miserable mind—images, Eliot insists, the common man would not understand. Eliot is vague about the sordid images.”
“The Psychogeography of T. S. Eliot’s City Poems” by Seda Şen (2019)
In this analysis of Eliot’s city poems, Sen notes that “the personae […] not only describe the city by looking at it from a distance, but also by walking in the streets and becoming part of it, which allows the reader to view the city panoramically and from up close.” In Sen’s reading of “Preludes” she draws parallels with James Thomson’s poem “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874), Victorian poet John Davidson’s poems about London, and also, for the last part of the poem, with Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), in which “the narrator follows [a] mysterious man day and night in the streets of London.”
Listen to Poem
In this video, British actor Jeremy Irons reads “Preludes” on BBC Radio 3's Words and Memory, uploaded to YouTube in June 2020.
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By T. S. Eliot
