In the final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s poem “Preludes,” Eliot intends to convey that the human condition is eternal, it will always be anguish-filled, regardless of the poem’s motif: time. In the first few lines, he exemplifies the predicament that is life through imagery. Eliot discusses the soul of a man which is “stretched tight across the skies” which “fade” and are “trampled” by the other inhabitants of the city. This image created can be compared to an individual whose resilience is running thin and is being broken down by the surrounding world causing this person’s very essence to wane. Thus, life becomes nothing more than a series of motions without any meaning and constant despair. Sequentially, Eliot utilizes repetition, referring to
the hours on a clock. The location of this furthers the idea that time passes but the overall state of existence fails to change. People are then reduced, through synecdoche, to just parts of a whole. It dehumanizes them in a way and shows that life is just happening to them, with little control of their own. Humanity is “impatient to assume the world,” to improve, but life gets in the way forcing everyone to be “infinitely suffering.” The diction choice of “infinitely” demonstrates Eliot’s beliefs: people will face agony forever, not just now, in the future, or in the past, but all of the above. In addition, this develops a hopeless feeling within the poem because a foul forever is unchanging and tragic. The last bit of the work finalizes and solidifies everything. Eliot writes that “the worlds revolve like ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots.” This image conjures the facts of poverty and of someone beaten down by life. The thought is disheartening, and humans naturally hope for something better, but Eliot hunkers down on the idea that “worlds revolve,” time passes and it still happens. We should not continue to hold onto this unrealistic optimism. Reality has been this way for years upon years, the setting changes, the means change, but the feeling - the roughness of life does not change and humanity remains trapped by the all-powerful entity time.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
The most obvious stylistic device used by Eliot is that of personification. She uses this device to create two people from her thoughts on old and new leisure. The fist person is New Leisure, who we can infer to be part of the growth of industry in the 19th century. He is eager and interested in science, politics, and philosophy. He reads exciting novels and leads a hurried life, attempting to do many things at once. Such characteristics help us to create an image of New Leisure as Eliot sees him.
The poems facilitate the investigation of human experience through illustrating life’s transience and the longevity of memory.
..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meaningless reduction/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and memory of a man has been sacrificed, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The “Dirge” which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The “Dirge” the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the internal contradictions in Kenneth Fearing’s poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a powerful modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.
The first half of the poems’ images are of life, coming of age, and death.
they turned out rather ill. “I’ve been to good a father to you all –
This seems like a pessimistic excerpt to precede a story that is comprehensively equally angst. The connection Eliot saw between this piece of “Satyricon” a...
The poem’s final stanza may seem to threaten this new-made reunion of language and reality with its chaotic profusion of reference, but in fact becomes a moment of consolidation in which the poet is able to pull together the fragmented “ruins” of self. In writing “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” (431), Eliot admits to the fractured nature of language; however, these fragments are no longer employed in the reflection of reality, but rather become a system of buttresses, a sort of scaffolding by which the decayed and decaying self can be supported. Thus, through the wealth of knowledge brought to us through language, there may yet be some hope of discovering the ‘peace that passeth understanding’.
Eliot’s use of symbolism can be very disorienting. It has been proposed that this choppy medley is actually furthering his point by representing the “ruins” of a culture. An article by Glyndŵr University states that, “Eliot wants us to experience that sense of fragmentation for ourselves, and this is why the poem uses a kind of collage technique - assembling chunks of texts together in what seems a random and arbitrary way - to recreate this sense of cultural rubble”. Eliot purposely used fragments of well known literary works to give the appearance that the culture was in pieces. Eliot style complemented the main point of his poetry, adding to the appearance of a culture in ruins.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of the Morning” and T.S Eliot’s “Prelude’s” both feature a vision of the morning in a certain city. They both pull attention to the urban settings. and the daily routines of ordinary people. In a bigger picture the lack of personal contact that each person has with others. However, while the former poem presents more of a clear description between the upper and lower class, showing that these two classes rarely ever interacted with one another. The latter poem tries to highlight some sad and dingy aspects of the modern city life through specific vigorous but symbolic images. T.S Eliot’s title “Prelude’s” introduces the fact that each prelude will have a different image, that than latter connects into one theme.
Silas Marner is one of the 19th century novels written by George Eliot in 1861, it publishes by William Blackwood and Sons. In general, the novel is about a man named Silas Marner. His life changes by a betrayed friend named William Dane who is greed of Silas's position in the church. Therefore, Silas leaves his village and goes to another because of the accusation that causes his dismissed from the church while he is guiltless. Then he works as a weaver and he collects gold through his work. One day a thief who is by a chance a brother of Eppie's father steals Silas's gold. In addition, he avoids building any relationships with the new village people because he cannot trust anybody, until he meets a miracle golden hair girl named Eppie. Silas meets her when her mother died right outside his cottage. Her mother came to search for her husband, but she did not find him. By that time, she died because of the freezing weather and she is carrying her child, which adds fuel to the fire. In another words Eppie is a gift who returns to Silas for his stolen gold. Subsequently, it leads to the change of his life to a better one.
...script version of "Gerontion," the old man is abandoned by nature, leaving him in his barren state. There is no hope for these characters to find meaning through nature because it is a force that is completely out of their control. However, by substituting "History" for "Nature" in "Gerontion," Eliot gives an element of hope to an otherwise dismal poem. By recognizing the old man's failure to perceive history in the "living" sense, the reader also recognizes that the perception of history lies in the individual. Unlike nature, man has a controlling influence in history. As long as this is understood, anyone, including the old man, can find belonging in the living sense of history in order to establish meaning in their present world.
Eliot is full of symbolism. This poem is different from the narrative poem of realism and the lyric poem of romanticism, but it is typical of symbolic poetry. The poem overall involves in some ancient mythology and shows the modern wasteland and people. The "Waste Land" is the symbol of the modern Europe, but also the symbol of modern people. Water is the oasis of life, but also the symbol of disaster. The hyacinth is a symbol of spring, and skeletons are a symbol of death, etc. The poet is good at using symbolism to put a series of disparate "pictures" together, combining many irrelevant images to form a subjective emotion. These five poems not only hint at the inevitable declining trend of western civilization and reflect the historical perspective, but also it has the realistic