Preludes Lyrics
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.
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.
About
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Broomielaw, Glasgow (1886)
“Preludes” (1910-11) describes an early winter’s evening in a dingy city neighborhood through the eyes of a skeptical or disillusioned observer.
The poem can be read as an indictment of modern society (see “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” for more in this vein) and, especially, the isolation of urban life in a modern, industrialized world. The introduction of the second-person address implicates the reader in this judgment as well. As with Lil and May in section II of The Waste Land, and with the woman at the door in Rhapsody on a Windy Night, Eliot is curiously detached and unsympathetic to the plight of those who try to survive in a harsh world, living in squalor and poverty.
Structurally the poem comprises four sections, each with a different point of view — the third person narrator, the woman, the man, and lastly the narrator speaking as ‘I’. There is an irregular rhyme scheme throughout, that creates unity in a poem with four different points of view.
The dominant imagery is of a decaying city and a degraded society, in which people have lost their essential humanity. Characteristically, Eliot presents symbols — smells, bodies, lamps — that appear and reappear throughout the poem. The mood and Eliot’s view of the world are negative and devoid of hope.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
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