Finally, evening again, still dull and monotonous. The poem is a series of descriptive variations based on details of a town scene, a winter evening, wet, dirty with unpleasant smell in the air a morning, the next perhaps, still dingy, nasty, dull and monotonous the morning again when one does not want to get up and when one reflects on dreams, still sordid and soiled, the “you” here being a woman. “And short square fingers stuffing pipes, And evening newspapers, and eyes Assured of certain certainties.” (Prelude IV) In preludes III and IV Eliot makes explicit the mind’s yearning for significance beyond the random contents of consciousness, presented in cubist disjunctiveness: The first line of second prelude (“The morning comes to consciousness”) shows Eliot’s conviction that the objects of perception, for all our attempts at objectivity, can never be wholly separated from the mind that perceives. The first two Preludes are examples of a kind of urban poetry that had existed fitfully in England since the middle of the 19th century. The first two Preludes present a purely objective rendering of the city at evening and morning, and are, in effect, Imagist poems, written even before Ezra Pound initiated an Imagist movement in London in 1912. The Preludes dwell on the same low aspects of urban life that we see depicted in Prufrock. The poet deliberately sets up an antithesis between the romantic suggestion of a 'love song' and the prosaic name J. The central character lacks the solidity of a Browning persona, being only a name with a voice. It exemplifies Eliot's tutelage to Jules Laforgue (1860-87) in its recourse to the ironical juxtaposition of solemnity and bathos and the free association of ideas.

However, the poem does have a certain coherence supplied by the consistency of the feeling expressed. Alfred Prufrock' is composed of a number of sections which seem to lack a sequence of events. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.Ī dramatic monologue in the Browning tradition, ' The Love Song of J.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.

Selected poems by ts eliot