T.S. Eliot The Eternal - Prufrock, Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night

© Anastasia  Marou 1990

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 This study, reviewed and revised by the author, was initially prepared
under the guidance and direction of Professor John G. Blair at the Faculty
of Letters, University of Geneva. It was presented and supported in July
1982 as the author's Thesis for the «licence ès lettres- - Master of Arts.

 

CHAPTER I

PRUFROCK, PRELUDES and
RHAPSODY ON A WINDY NIGHT

Prufrock is an obscure poem. If we concentrate on tracing the sources
of lines, our aesthetic appreciation suffers. In Prufrock one can find echoes
of the French symbolists and the English metaphysicals. Such knowledge
constitutes, no doubt, a good background, but stressed beyond a degree,
encumbers the mind. I therefore suggest that such allusions, sources and
parallels be given only secondary consideration or referred to only when
the logic of the emotion compels us. Again much of the obscurity of the
poem depends on the interpretation of the inner elements and the external
elements. The thoughts of Prufrock and the description of the landscape
are indiscriminately intermingled with the theme of time and are influenced
by the stream - of - consciousness technique. Here time has been
arrested in its movement and there is no sequence of events, no passage
of time. From the very opening lines of the poem we are aware of this
arrest of the march of time:

The evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

These lines suggest that there is a kinship between Prufrock and the even-
ing; peaceful but artificially so and with an undertone of unhealthiness and
unease. Thus Prufrock and one particular moment of time - the evening
- are to be indentified. This notion is intensified when the following lines
from «East Coker» in Four Quartets are considered: They reveal much of
the significance that the idea of etherization holds for Eliot:

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but

conscious of nothing 

Prufrock and the evening are «conscious but conscious of nothing» and
Prufrock certainly, rapt in a monotonous routine, pondering his «over-
whelming question» - which, if it exists at all in any coherent shape will
certainly, we feel, never be asked - must experience «the terror of nothing
to think about». It is the terror of suspended time, of time arrested in one
moment of consciousness. Prufrock is indeed a tragic figure. He suffers

in a hell of defeated idealism, tortured by unappeasable desires. He dares
not risk the disappointment of seeking actual love, which even if he found
it and had energy enough for it, still could not satisfy him. The plight of
this hesitant, inhibited man, an aging dreamer trapped with sordidness,
mirrors the plight of the sensitive in the presence of the dull, of the
monotonous. The unbearing dullness of Prufrock's life finds expression in
this arrest of the march of time. Prufrock, therefore, through his timidity is
incapable of action.

In contrast with the lady in the Portrait, who feels that she might come
alive with lilacs in the spring, he has descended, because of his very
idealism, into a winter of passivity. To pursue this tragical analogy, one
might call Prufrock's idealism the «curse» which co-operates with this flaw
to make him wretched. Alone, neither curse nor flaw would be dangerous;
together they destroy him. Prufrock's responsiveness to ideal values is
something theoretically good in itself, an appanage of virtue. Yet, it has
some of the characteristics of impiety, for it is sentimental instead of ethi-
cal. His values are inherited from the romantic-love tradition, a cult of the
unreal and consequently of the incomprehensible. By indulging in day-
dreams (the soliloquy in the poem itself), he has allowed his ideal concep-
tion of woman (the sea-girls at the end) to dominate his transactions with
reality. And therefore, it is impossible for the reader to trace any real
sequence or events in the poem. Prufrock has neither used human love
nor rejected it but has cultivated an illusory notion of it which has
paralysed his will and kept him from turning desire into action.

To avoid ambiguity, we must first separate the descriptions of the
external setting of the poem from the musings of Prufrock. The time is
evening and the setting is urban. The evening is still. The stillness is rein-
forced by the simile of an etherized patient, extended by the comparison
of the evening to a sleeping person:

And the afternoon the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me

These two figures of speech together point to the fact that Eliot is in this
poem dealing with one moment of consciousness and its projections.
Again we have no sequence of events in time or sequence in reminis-
censes or memories. Nor is there any progress of events in space.

The proposed journey does not materialize. Prufrock is filled with misgivings
about the usefulness of his own past life. The rhetorical interrogation,
«Would it have been worth it after all?», refers not merely to the contents
of the immediate lines which follow it but also refers to the situation of
Prufrock. That central situation is one of spiritual distress, and it is the con-
sciousness of this spiritual distress that prompts his confession.

At this moment of consciousness, when he has been brought to
realize the worthlessness of his life, he itemizes the details of such a life.
The past and the future of Prufrock have been gathered into this moment
of consciousness. There is no progress, no movement in the «time-space
continuum» of Prufrock. He ends the poem where he began. Yet there is
a progress: a deeper and deeper exploration of Prufrock's inner world and
an analysis of Prufrock's existential condition. The realities of life have not
made their impact on him. He is impotent so to speak. Yet he is dimly
aware that he is lost, that he represents an unredeemed life and that he
would like to choose a more purposeful course of life.

Although time in Prufrock is apparently suspended, Eliot certainly
does not want us to believe that time is abolished, stopped or accelerated.
In so far as the concept of time is a major one in the whole of Eliot's
poetry we may say that there are two sorts of time in Prufrock, which we
might call true time and false time. False time has to do with those experi-
ences that lead nowhere, like the aimless streets of Prufrock's wanderings.
This is the time of the third stanza, a time which seems to allow for every-
thing but actually for nothing since all the events turn back on themselves:

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the events and days of hands
That lift and drop a question in your plate;
Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

 

Time here associates the scene with Prufrock's mental indecision, but time
also offers him an escape. This escape is good, however, only until the
crucial moment for the question arrives and it will be observed how the
tension mounts as the time shortens, reaching a climax where he must
begin and where there will be no more time for postponement. Unruffled,
with the feeling that there is an indefinite time for all kinds of enjoyment,
Prufrock makes repeated attempts to «force the moment» of decision to
its crisis but lacks the strenght. However, we must not regard this stanza
as entirely negative. Actually, Eliot conceives the conflict within human
experiences in terms of immanence. The real or the true is already present
in the false or lesser reality. The significant, already part of the insignific-
ant, is waiting to be understood by us. Just as the streets of the first
stanza do lead to the overwhelming question, so the insignificant in human
experience does embody the significant. Thus, real or true time, which is
time that contains significant experiences - those having purpose and
direction - is immanent in false time, the time which returns unto itself.
This is implied in the lines: «And time for all the works and days of hands
/ That lift and drop a question on your plate». All experiences, from cre-
ation to murder (death), contain as their ultimate dimension the over-
whelming question. Similar issues are evoked in the difficult stanza:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us and we drown.

Some critics interpret these lines as meaning that all of us, who are like
Prufrock, have remained indecisive in the midst of the possibilities of sal-
vation; and we will continue there until we die. But such a reading leaves
out too much of what is in the poem as a whole. A more plausible interpre-
tation is offered through the concept of immanence that Eliot will fully
develop in the Four Quartets; We,etherized patients, who live in our limbo-
like trance of doing nothing, have been near the sources of salvation: we
will remain there until we cease our state of mere physical existence of
«death-in-life» and attain our spiritual rebirth, our «life-in-death». The key
phrase of the latter interpretation is «lingering in the chambers of the sea»,
which is tied to the questions that are dropped on our plate and the streets
that lead to the overwhelming question. The possibilities of salvation are
within our ordinary temporal experiences; we need only reach out to
secure them. This is not to say that Prufrock is a secular pre-christian
poem and it will be disconcerting to interpret the poem as such. What is true about Prufrock is that the immanence doctrine of time, which Eliot
later developed in his creative life, namely in the Four Quartets, is no
novelty since it is already present in his first important poem.

A second-level interpretation consists in our considering the whole of
Prufrock as the struggle between the actual and the ideal in order to
emancipate ourselves from the acceptance of the ultimate character of
false time and to recognize instead that which is within our temporal
experiences as their ultimate moment, the overwhelming question. It is
only in this sense that Prutrock may be taken as a religious poem. Eliot
will go on to give his renewed views of the Prufrockian problem in the Pre-
ludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Here again the time element pre-
sented in a different way will be essential to Eliot's treatment of the actual
and the ideal.

The Preludes are better unified than Eliot's method of composing
them might seem to have encouraged. Indeed, the first and the second,
written in close succession, not only complement each other but together
lead into an epistemological concept entertained in the third and fourth.
And all four agree in imagery. They illustrate a practice tested in Prufrock
and followed again in the Rhapsody namely, of depersonalizing character
by talking about bodily members such as feet, hands, eyes, fingers. Eliot's
virtual repetition in the fourth Prelude of the imagery from the opening lines
of Prufrock supports his renewed treatment of the ideal and the actual, or
rather his review of the Prufockian problem. Here the premise is not that
the three personages are spiritually superior to external actuality but rather
that they have no images distinguishable from it. Prufrock, while cringing
immobilized before the actual, does not relinquish the ideal. But the
woman and the street not only do not have any such ideal in reserve but,
indeed, cannot have, for their consciousness and the external scene are
identical. In other words, they cannot be in the manner of Prufrock, roman-
tic idealists because their consciousness embraces only what their senses
can confront. One may surmise a partial debt of Bergson, whom Eliot had
been reading in Paris.

In Bergson's Matter and Memory an image can be indifferently defined as a perception or as the perceived thing itself, so that
subject and object merge. The perceiver, by coming into contact with the
material world, absorbs images into his consciousness where they persist
as memories. In the aggregate, memories thus form a duree, considered
-by Bergson to be creative, since, as he explains in Creative Evolution, they
affect the perception of things in the perceiver's future. Eliot's poem, however, holds up to view a set of images so disagreeable, or at any rate so
empty of charm, that an optimism like Bergson's must appear implausible.
What vital impulse can animate either the woman or the street, however
impatient for creative action, if the consciousness of each is downtrodden
and spriritless? Thus the fourth Prelude turns to pity, to a «notion of some
infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing» incarnate in these depersonalized
images and, therefore, in the souls comprising them.

The Bergsonian philosophy of time functioning as duration has also
influenced Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Orderly thought dissolved into irra-
tional, discontinuous mental impressions, obey the laws of instinctive con-
sciousness as seen by Bergson. Images here seem to be derived from a
Kaleidoscope, they resemble fluid perception pouring into memory, the
organ of time; memory's «floors» break down in order to enable a total
synthesis. This dreamlike process works by free association rather than by
logic. The word «rhapsody» suggests a musical meditation, implying the
irregularity and diversity tied to a principle of association.

The Rhapsody has for a speaker a man who, experiencing a «vision
of the street», soliloquizes in response to visual images. His conscious-
ness, which corresponds to that of the woman in the Preludes marshals
the flickering images into a pattern of subjective duree. In the poem there
is also a clock-time structure (or, as Bergson would say a «spatial» struc-
ture) divided by the hours announced at the begining of the strophes:
«Twelve o'clock», «Half past one», and the rest. This structure is spatial
more particularly because the times correspond to the speaker's pauses
at street-lamps. But as each lamp mutters an «incantation» to direct his
gaze toward new spatial images, these pass into his memory and unite
with memories already there to make up subjective time where space is
non-existant. The rhapsody of consciousness moves like a musical com-
position by introducing, abandoning and returning to set themes scattered
in time. Among its recurrent motifs are irrationality and decay or inanima-
tion. Irrationality is shown by the dissolving of «divisions and precisions»,
the madman shaking the geranium, the lapping tongue of the cat, the
automatic gesture of the child, the vacancy behind the child's eye, the
instinctive reflex of the crab, the moon's loss of memory. Decay is illus-
trated by the dead geranium, the pin, the twisted driftwood rusty spring,
the mechanical toy, the paper rose, the reek of airless places, the bed
waiting for its occupant. Depressing images besiege the speaker's con-
sciousness, for he cannot evade them: what is more dismaying, they constitute his soul, for he is similar to the woman in the third Prelude.

The withdrawal of the speaker into his solidarity room, as the last lamp shows
him the way, favours no escape from a world within. «Mernory!», the lamp
reminds him: «You have the key»; and memory, through which the essence
of time is manifested, «is the key» to the imprisoning life for which his
repose shall prepare - not the memory of what the intelligence can learn,
like unalterable reality. And so the pity that in the fourth Prelude can be
diverted to the slums and their creatures comes back to the poet, or to
the mask through which he speaks. It comes in the shape of terror for his
own trapped human situation, and the knowledge pierces him with a «last
twist of the knife».

NOTES
(1) T.S. Eliot, Introduction to Le Serpent by Paul Valery
(2) The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, ed. Faber and Faber, 1969, «East
Coker», Ill, p. 180.
(3) Foster, Steven. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, VII, 1965, «Relativity
and The Waste Land: A Postulate»
(4) Fjelde, Rolf. Western Review, «Time, Space and Wyndham l.ewis», 1951, pp.
60-67.
(5) Russell, Bertrand: The ABC of Relativity, p. 55, London 1925
(6) Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. Four Quartets, Casebook Series, The Macmillan Press,
London 1969, pp. 138-152.
(7) Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, ed. A.V.Bever, Paris, 1917, p. 242.
(8) T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, «Tradition and Individual Talent», ed. Faber and
Faber, 1976, p. 15.

LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED
1. Bergson, Henri, Duree et Simultsneite, Paris 1922
2. Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. Four Quartets, Casebook Series, The Macmillan Press,
London 1969
3. Bergsten, Staffan, Time and Eternity
4. Eliot, T.S., The Complete Poems and Plays of TS. Eliot, ed. by Faber and
Faber, London 1969
5. Eliot, T.S., Selected Essays, ed. by Faber and Faber, London 1976
6. Gardner, Helen, The Art of TS. Eliot, The Crescent Press, London 1949
7. Kenner, Hugh, The Invisible Poet, ed. by W.H. Alien, London 1960
8. Martin, Jay, ed. The Waste Land: A Col/ection of Critical Essays, Prentice-
Hall, lnc., 1972.
9. Smith, Graver, Jr., TS. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, The University of Chigago
Press, Illinois 1956
10. Southam, B.C., ed. Prufrock, Geroniion, Ash Wednesday and other shorter
poems, Casebook Series, The Macmillan Press, London 1978
11. Unger, Leonard, TS. Eliot: Moments and Patterns, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 1966.