According to the poet himself, Eliot wrote the poem one Sunday after church (he converted to Christianity in 1927, the same year he wrote this), supposedly after imbibing half a bottle of gin. This was the first of Eliot’s popular Christmas poems, which he composed for special booklets/greetings cards published by the company he worked for, Faber and Faber. Here is a recording of Eliot reading the poem. The image (right) is of St Michael’s Church, where Eliot’s ashes are interred. (Andrew Elliott had left East Coker for New England in the late seventeenth century he was one of the judges at the Salem ‘witch’ trials of 1692.)Įliot also quotes from his sixteenth-century ancestor Thomas Elyot in the poem. This is the second poem in the sequence, named after the small village in Somerset from which Eliot’s ancestors hailed. We could have included Four Quartets as a poem in its own right, but the sequence can also be viewed as a collection of four individual pieces. This is one of the Four Quartets, which some critics – including Helen Gardner (who features in our pick of the best books about Eliot’s poetry) – have branded Eliot’s masterpiece. This picture of urban life makes ‘Preludes’ an important precursor – indeed, prelude – to T. In this quartet of short Eliot poems there seems to be little escape from the everyday urban life of drudgery: you get up, you go to work, you come home, you sleep (or try to), you do it all again the next day. Things don’t change, the world keeps turning, things largely remain constant. Hulme (whose work we’ve discussed here), and F. Although critic Hugh Kenner thought these poems were not imagist per se, they are perhaps the meeting-point between Eliot’s poetry and that of poets like Richard Aldington, T. Read the full text of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”ġ6The street lamp said, "Regard that womanġ7Who hesitates towards you in the light of the doorģ1Rust that clings to the form that the strength has leftģ5"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,ģ7And devours a morsel of rancid butter."ģ9Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.Ĥ0I could see nothing behind that child's eye.Ĥ2Trying to peer through lighted shutters,Ĥ4An old crab with barnacles on his back,Ĥ5Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.Ħ1That cross and cross across her brain."ħ4The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,ħ6The bed is open the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,ħ7Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."ħ7Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.This is an almost imagistic portrayal of modern urban living with all is squalid and unseemly aspects. The poem was first published in 1915 in Blast 2, the second and final edition of an influential literary magazine edited by Wyndham Lewis. The poem ends with its speaker arriving home with the prospect of the next day feeling like the "last twist of the knife"-perhaps the ultimate insult, to have to get ready for the day ahead despite the creeping sense that life lacks any purpose or meaning. The world around the narrator seems at once familiar and strangely nightmarish, and a sense of futility and hopelessness invades the speaker's experience of the world as time goes on. It follows its narrator wandering an urban street from midnight until 4:30 a.m. Often considered one of Eliot's most difficult poems, "Rhapsody" is above all an investigation into time, memory, and the mind. It was written in 1911, around the time Eliot was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is an early poem by one of the 20th century's foremost literary figures, T.S.
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