PRELUDES PARAGRAPH SCAFFOLDS

Alienation and Isolation

- In Preludes, Eliot condemns the modern urban landscape as blighted by spiritual decay
and a place in which individuals are isolated from human companionship and one's
personal humanity.
- Urban landscape is, again, represented as a decaying and alienating setting - not
somewhere people find warmth or connections. (quotes and analysis from imagery in
Prelude 1: steak...burnt out ends...broken blinds and chimney pots...).
- Unlike his more free-flowing and random poems, Eliot’s Preludes is structured on a
twenty four hour day and captures the cyclic monotony and drudgery by beginning at
“Six o’clock”(Prelude 1, line 3); disassociated from actual control over their own lives,
only passive slaves to the modern commercial city and ‘time.
- Indeed, this urban landscape is so dehumanising that individual people are seen as
being nothing more than ‘the parts of their bodies (hands...feet,+ synecdoche Prelude 2)
which are useful for being parts of the urban industrial machine; the inhabitants of this
world are further detached from the dignity of humanity, effectively being ‘owned by
the street’: sawdust-trampled street/with all its muddy feet that press/to early coffee-
stands (Prelude 2)
- According to Eliot, the ‘grimy streets’ (select another quote) of the external world have
become the soul of its inhabitants; the only form of connection between individuals is
‘sordid’ (Prelude 3)...Or clasped the yellow soles of feet/In the palms of both soiled
hands + analysis
- Eliot expands his critique of the urban landscape to focus on the subsequent cultural
and spiritual isolation: ‘grimy scraps’ (P1), motif of newspapers meaningless culture Commented [1]: The consequences of alienation from
(P1,3&4); the ‘performance/masquerade’ sequence of images (in Prelude 3+analysis). a source of meaning are further examined in Prelude 3,
where Eliot switches the point-of-view of the poem to
- While Eliot held out hope that people would again become familiar again and united speak directly to a prostitute as she struggles to wake
with God (IV: fancies that are curled...and cling...infinitely gentle...thing’) he ultimately to yet another day of physical ravishment and
humiliation,...recollecting the “thousand sordid images/
presents this desire for reunification between the human and spiritual realms as folly;
Of which her soul is constituted,”...the unsavoury
Eliot is clear that ‘the worlds’ - the cosmos and his modern urban landscape - is void of images of the previous life that has reduced her soul
values and ultimately ‘revolve like ancient women’ in a never-ending cycle of into a commodity for lust... her soul now isolated from
her humanity and condemned to an eternity in hell from
disillusionment, with this spiritually disconnected existence - as pointless as the act [where] there is no relief.
of ‘gathering fuel in vacant lots’.
- Thus, Eliot ironically merges the internal experience with that of the external world;
similar to the emptiness and desolation of the external life, the mind of the individual also
suffers a sense of isolation and misery.