Preludes

Summary

The word prelude comes from the Middle French word prélude, which means "notes sung or played to test the voice or instrument" (1530s), which is derived from Medieval Latin preludium "prelude, preliminary," from Latin praeludere "to play beforehand for practice, preface," from prae- "before" + ludere "to play.” It was first used in the purely musical sense in English in the 1650s. In this poem, the title Preludes could refer to any and all of those meanings: testing the voice, a prelude to a longer work, before a play, or preface to a musical piece.

Section-1

The first prelude of the poem is set on a winter evening in a city, at the time of day when people are returning home from work, during a rainstorm. It’s a dirty, sinister, pungent, lonely place filled with waste. Motifs are introduced that continue throughout the poem: time, light, newspapers, discarded and broken objects, the street, and vacant lots. The cozy domesticity and occasional rhyming meter is disrupted by images of desolation and routine depersonalization.

Section-2

The second prelude takes place in the morning, which smells and looks disgusting. City dwellers are reduced to symbols of their work: feet and hands, moving repetitiously. They act as if in a play, with only a pretense of meaning. And their lives are all the same.

Section-3

The third prelude introduces a character who the speaker addresses directly. She lies awake at night, thinking of her debased life. Then at dawn, she experiences a consciousness of the world as she prepares for her day.

Section-4

The fourth prelude, written several years after the others, introduces Christian imagery. Christ is imagined in the sky, blocked by the city, and in the street, trod upon by pedestrians. The poem returns to the evening routines of the working class, numbed by nicotine and news. The speaker then gets personal about his emotional experience of a religious impulse intertwined with his poetic imagination. Then he dismisses these “fancies” with an embarrassed gesture and ends with an image representing a spiritual void.

Literary Elements

Themes

Time

The title of the poem itself, "Preludes," already contains a reference to chronological time. A prelude is something that comes before ("pre") the main action ("lude," play or action).
Each of the preludes is set at a particular time of day. In the first prelude this is precise: six o’clock. Clock time relates to other types of time in the poem such as the time of year—winter, when it gets dark early. The lighting of the lamps suggests one way that city life goes contrary to nature: it’s an artificial way to continue daylight beyond its natural course, to supercede a diurnal cycle with modern technology. The mechanical nature of clock time determines the way that people move and relate in urban life.
The poem’s focus on disembodied feet and hands performing repetitive actions could also be a reference to the hands of a clock. There is also a judgement in the poem about the quality of life lived in the context of industrial time: “The burnt-out ends of smoky days” is a metaphor, which compares the time of day to the ashes of a cigarette butt. So: life in the city is filled with smoke, and ends in exhaustion.
Time is also marked by the sensory experience of human behavior. In "Preludes," the evening and morning are personified as themselves experiencing the cyclical smells of human life (steaks for dinner in the evenings, and stale beer from the night before in the morning).
Finally, the poem personifies time as a kind of director of the play of city life. Take the phrase “time resumes” the “masquerade”: This implies a fictional existence, organized by a false order of time. In the final prelude, time multiplies to “four and five and six o’clock,” seemingly all at once, but the human actions are nevertheless identical and thoughtless, ignoring both the divine nature of the “infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering” sky above them, and the dirty street below them.

Monotony

Repetition is built into the structure of the overall poem. Over the course of the four preludes, evening turns to morning, which returns to evening, then morning, then evening again. This by itself isn’t tedious, but when you add emotive descriptors like burnt-out, grimy, broken, and lonely, the cyclical nature of life in the city takes on the burden of misery, becoming monotonous.
The theme of time deepens into despair when mechanical time produces mechanical people, whose lives become anonymous and identical: “all the hands/That are raising dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms.”

Debasement

"Preludes" contains many images of human life reduced to something partial, sinister, and broken. In the third prelude, this is expressed most directly as “The thousand sordid images/Of which your soul was constituted.” A soul, which should be infinite, is limited to a thousand ignoble images. Humans are described by their feet and hands—body parts that move and work, and get “muddy,” “yellow,” and “soiled”; the speaker does not mention the more personal, "spiritual" areas of faces and hearts. Their lives are also directed by their appetites for food, sex, alcohol, and coffee. Life is described as a “masquerade,” a false pretense of reality.
Symbolically, the songbird in the tree representing the hope of spring, is replaced by the degraded sparrow in the gutter. The city dwellers are so preoccupied that they blacken the holy street with their “insistent” feet; their debased state ignores the possibilities of grace and salvation. Even old women at the end are reduced to scrounging for fuel.

Motif

Time

Time is a motif in the poem and also a theme. Every prelude makes reference to some type of time: clock time, the time of day, the time of year, time as marked by human rituals (such as the lighting of lamps, the cooking of dinner, the consumption of coffee and alcohol), messianic time, and historical/mythic time.

Newspapers

The “evening newspapers” in prelude IV are a metonym for the cyclical unchanging wastefulness of urban life, and for its narcotic effect on people, like the tobacco in the pipes. In prelude III, newspapers act as curling devices to contribute to the masquerade of a prostitute’s hair. In prelude I, at sunset, they end up as garbage blowing in “vacant lots” around the feet of commuting pedestrians. This is a depressing judgment of human intellect as wasted daily on mindless, comforting entertainment.

Filth

With adjectives such as smokey, grimy, dingy, soiled, and sordid, the poem returns again and again to the inescapable filth of the city. It collects on hands and feet and window shades, and it stinks. Decayed, wasted, and broken objects also contribute to the disgusting living conditions

Light

Natural and artificial light have a tense relationship in Preludes. As the evening falls, lamplighters ritualistically light the streetlamps, continuing the evening past the natural diurnal cycle. In the morning, “dingy shades” are raised to let light into equally depressing rooms. The light thus creates the images of the poem, as if they were theatrical vignettes. There is also an ironic moment when the dark of night reveals the soul’s images. Sunlight is personified as a sneaky subject who “creeps” and is blocked by shutters but brings all the world back with it.

Symbol

In classical poetry, the sound of birds is a symbol of spring. But in "Preludes," Eliot mentions the drabbest of birds, sparrows, in the lowliest urban setting, the gutters. The sparrows are thus a symbol of the debased world.

Poetic Devices

Form and Meter

Preludes can be read as four separate poems and or one poem of 54 lines. The four preludes are written in free verse that goes in and out of organized meter and rhyme.
The first part has an irregular rhyme structure, tying together images with words like “wraps”/“scraps,” “stamps”/“lamps” and “shutters”/“gutters.”
The second prelude is the most regular, with an abcadefdef rhyme structure.
The third prelude is one sentence, that contains a sequence of parallel clauses beginning with “you” and “and.” This emphasizes the theme of monotony.
The fourth prelude is the most irregular. The soul moves through it as a subject both “stretched tight across the skies” and “trampled by insistent feet.” This is disrupted by the synecdoches beginning with “And.”

Metaphor

“The burnt-out ends of smoky days” \n This compares the time of day to the ashes of a cigarette butt.

“With the other masquerades” \n People are acting within the pretense of a meaningful life.

Simile

“The worlds revolve like ancient women/ Gathering fuel in vacant lots.” \n The world moves circularly without end. The preludes continue over and over, without the advent of meaning. “Ancient” refers to the old problem of the human condition. “Women” are physical representations of the cycles of life because they give birth. The last image is a paradox because the women gather substance to burn, to light the world so they can see it, keep warm, and cook their food, but they gather it from an empty space in the city. There is nothing of real substance there. The world is a spiritual void, yet we continue to live in it.

Alliteration

The repeated Bs in“Beat,” “broken,” and “blinds” creates the sense of something striking or hitting. \n "S" sounds repeat throughout, suggesting a sinister or alienated atmosphere.

Allusions

“His soul stretched tight across the skies” \n “The notion of some infinitely gentle \n Infinitely suffering thing.”

This is a religious allusion to Christ and the crucifixion.

Personification

“The winter evening settles down/With smell of steaks in passageways.”

“The morning comes to consciousness/Of faint stale smells of beer”

The time of year and time of day are given conscious and sensory experiences of the city.

“With the other masquerades \n That time resumes” \n Time is personified as a director of the play of city life.

“The conscience of a blackened street \n Impatient to assume the world.”

In the fourth prelude, filled with Christian allusions, the street has a consciousness, implying that Christ’s spirit is within the humblest everyday places.

Hyperbole

“In a thousand furnished rooms.” \n The poem’s vision of meaningless modern life multiplies by a thousand, raising it to the level of social critique.

Synecdoche

“Muddy feet” \n “All the hands” \n “Or clasped the yellow soles of feet \n In the palms of both soiled hands.” \n “insistent feet” \n “short square fingers stuffing pipes” \n “and eyes”

The poem represents the people of the city as their feet and hands, the parts of their bodies that work and perform repetitive routines.