A century old this year, T.S. Eliot's
Preludes raises the curtain on his great modernist masterpieces,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste
Land and The Hollow Men. In essence four poems rather
than one, Preludes can be described as vignettes which span a
single day, and which in their differentiated images reveal the contemptible,
soul-stunting conditions of modern life. These four fragments of a (failed) vision,
themselves point to the theme not only of the poem itself, but virtually all of Eliot's
early work: Western culture is a broken thing. Its human survivors live a rootless,
alienated existence in the modern city. Only in the fourth vignette does the poet
glimpse a meaning beyond the futility and meaninglessness he
experiences:
I am moved by fancies that are
curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely
gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
At the close
of the day, as "the skies...fade behind a city block", and the streets darken, filled
with the sound of "tramping feet", the poet is left alone to reflect on another tedious
evening of "fingers stuffing pipes" and small-minded "certainties". Yet in a moment his
ennui is changed; he is moved by the inrushing epiphany of a transcendent perception.
For an instant he sees the 'inscape' behind these dreary images, a Christ-like
"infinitely suffering thing" that can save him.
But such a
'prelude' to a transfigured existence is laughable. With a coarse "wipe across your
mouth" the poet returns to his unbelieving way of life where world both visible and
invisible tediously "revolve like ancient women/Gathering fuel in vacant
lots".
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