T.S. Eliot: Poems
Discuss how the four different scenarios in Eliot's 'Preludes' can be read as a single picture of urban squalor and decadance.
With the use of technical details.
With the use of technical details.
All you really have to do is consider the first stanza of the poem. The first prelude of the poem is set on a winter evening in a city, at the time of day when people are returning home from work, during a rainstorm. It’s a dirty, sinister, pungent, lonely place filled with waste. Motifs are introduced that continue throughout the poem: time, light, newspapers, discarded and broken objects, the street, and vacant lots. The cozy domesticity and occasional rhyming meter is disrupted by images of desolation and routine depersonalization.