Preludes Lyrics

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About

Genius Annotation

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.

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Credits
Produced By
Written By
Recorded At
Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, London
Release Date
June 10, 1917
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