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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
The Straits of Belle Isle (French for “Beautiful Island”) separate Labrador from Newfoundland. They’re notoriously windy.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
One of T. S. Eliot’s earlier poems, published in the same volume as “Prufrock” (Prufrock and Other Observations) in 1917.
The word ‘Rhapsody’ in the title is used often to describe a piece of music. Eliot used musical form to title Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’. It is ironic in that it also means an ecstatic expression of feeling. This poem is anything but ecstatic, but ominous, sinister and defeatist, telling as it does a story of a dislocated mind belonging to a person dissociated from reality, living in a decaying, squalid, dehumanised world. As with Lil and May in section II of The Waste Land, and with the characters in Preludes, Eliot is curiously detached and unsympathetic to the plight of those who try to survive in a harsh world, living in squalor and poverty.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night is culturally significant not only for its status as an Eliot poem – it was partially adapted into the famous show tune ‘Memory’ from the 1981 musical Cats, itself based on another Eliot collection.
Structure
The verse is free, allowing Eliot to explore ideas and themes unimpeded by strict poetic structure, as appropriate to the dream-like subject.
The coherence of the poem, however, is achieved by recurring themes, notably memories and the seaside. Time provides the framework, as the speaker progresses from midnight to morning.
Language and Imagery
The poem might be considered a dramatic monologue, the speaker describing dream-like experiences to an unnamed listener. The first person singular pronoun is used in line eight.
Words and imagery are introduced and recur throughout. So the geranium in stanza one is repeated in terms of the dead geraniums in stanza six. The beach, street-lamps, time, the moon, are ideas that hold the poem together, though their connections are unclear; deliberately so as the poem is recounting what seems to be a nightmare. The reasons for the choices are also not always clear, for example, why should the flower be a geranium? However, the overall effect is eerie and disturbing.
What is this?
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The threatening, predatory tiger is a contrast to the sweetness of youth and babyhood in the preceeding lines.
Blake’s The Tyger tends to come to mind when reading any poem which refers to tigers. Here it can be taken as evidence of God’s darker, deadlier side.
Understanding the meaning of “Christ the Tiger” is crucial to understanding this poem. Christ is presented as something more powerful and fearsome than a baby. Eliot, like Blake rejects a naïve/sentimental interpretation of a meek ChristEliot has a different understanding of Christ.
Here’s what Grover Smith, an Eliot critic, has to say on the matter:
“But Christ came not to send peace, but a sword; the Panther of the bestiaries, luring the gentler beasts with His sweet breath of doctrine, is also the Tiger of destruction. For the "juvescence of the year,” in which He came, marked the beginning of our dispensation, the “depraved May” ever returning with the “flowering judas” of man’s answer to the Incarnation. And so “The tiger springs in the new year,” devouring us who have devoured Him."
For Smith Christ is “the beginning of our dispensation.” Dispensation means both “exemption from a usual rule or requirement” and “system of order”. Eliot suggests that Christ, on the one hand, promises “exemption” from death, but that this comes with the “system of order” of morality and faith.
What is this?
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Stonecrop, or sedum, is a sort of flowering plant:
Merds is shit; c.f. the French “merde”.
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Cape Horn. It’s notoriously windy.
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T. S. Eliot’s 1920 ode to being old. And dry. And generally knowing lots of quotations from old books.
Eliot originally wanted to position this poem in front of The Waste Land; Ezra Pound convinced him not to, presumably because he’d get more money for publishing the two poems separately.
“Gerontion” is the Ancient Greek for “Little Old Man.” The speaker of the monologue has been interpreted by some critics as the exhausted, desiccated voice of post-WWI Europe, or a representative figure of that time and place.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
Telemachus is Ulysses' son. Post-Homeric tradition has it he went on to marry Circe. Or Cassiphone. Or Nausicaa. Or Polycaste. Post-Homeric tradition is actually just guessing.
This section is open to interpretation. The stanza describes Telemachus in perhaps half-hearted terms after the description of the glory of travel. ‘Well-loved of me’ sounds passionless. As the plodding description progresses the reader may wonder if there was any relationship whatsoever between the two, for all that Ulysses seems to respect his son’s ability.
