Analysis of Preludes
T. S. Eliot 1888 (St. Louis, Missouri, United States) – 1965 (Kensington)
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Scheme | XABAAACACACA A AXCAA AAAAA XDEADEXAACAFFCA ABCBAAACG GEXE XXA |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 01010101 111101 101 01111101 01010101 0101 11010111 0101101 0101 11010101 01010101 01011101 01010101 01011100 111111 101101 11110111 110101 10101 1101 111101 1110101 0010101 11010101 110111010 110101010 01010100 11111100 11001010 0110111 0011101010 0110100010 111010101 1011001 10010111 11010111 11010111 0011111 11110101 11010101 11010101 11010101 01110101 0101001 01110100 01010101 01010101 111110111 01110001 01011100010 10001001 111011101 010111010 100100101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,744 |
Words | 310 |
Sentences | 12 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 12, 1, 5, 5, 15, 9, 4, 3 |
Lines Amount | 54 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 180 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 38 |
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"Preludes" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/54136/preludes>.
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