Instead the characters can only make meaningful connections with the city. In ‘Prufrock’ the description of the streets in the first three stanzas of the poem show a familiarity with the city. He does not simply talk about the street and the different buildings and establishment that can be found there, inste are given detailed descriptions of the “half-deserted streets” with “cheap hotels” and sawdust restaurants”. This thorough account of the setting allows us to deduce that Prufrock accustomed with this city or at least parts of it.
This familiarity contrast with the unease and unfamiliarity of Prufrock’s relationship with his romantic interest. Throughout the poem as he contemplates the possibility of a relationship there is a hesitancy and uncertainty about it that is demonstrated through the repetition of questions such as “Do I dare? ” and other enquiries. The only time that questions are not being asked in the poem is in the first few standards in which Prufrock contemplates moving through the city. Moreover the lines “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all” (pg. 6) and “That is not it at all,/That is not what I meant at all. ” (pg. 7) are most likely words that Prufrock is imagining his romantic interest saying to him. And this shows that even when he is only contemplating a possible relationship between them he envisions that there would be a lack of understanding between them. This familiarity with the city is developed further in ‘Preludes’. In the third stanza Eliot writes that the sordid images of the night that are revealed constituted the soul.
These images that the night reveal would be shadows caused by the world outside, and the use of the word “sordid” makes the reader recall Eliot’s earlier descriptions in the first stanza of “smoky days” and “grimy scraps” and the second stanza’s “faint stale smells of beer” and “sawdust-trampled streets” as these would all constitute a sordid setting of a modern city. ” And yet despite this distasteful description of the city Eliot still writes that the soul of the person addresses as “you” in the third stanza is formed by these images of a squalid, degenerate city.
The city is a part of this person and this shows that there is a very intense bond between the two. It is as if the failure to make meaningful connections with other people mean that the people in Eliot’s poetry have to turn to the only other presence that they are familiar with in their lives and that is the city that they inhabit. The personification of the city in Eliot’s is further evidence of the city being used in place of real human relationships.
In “Rhapsody of a Windy Night’ the street-lamp “sputtered”, “muttered” and “hummed”, the moon “whispers” “winks”. In ‘Preludes’ “the morning comes to consciousness” like all the other inhabitants of the city waking up to another day. And when the city is not being personified it is being domesticated like a pet. The fog in ‘Prufrock’and the smoke “rubs its back upon the window-panes”, “licked its tongue” and “curled once about the house”. Both incorporeal substances of the city are given catlike descriptions.
And these are animals that are part of the intimate relationships that people make, which the city is being used to represent. The fog in ‘Morning at the Window’, however, tosses up faces belonging to strangers on the street. As if it were taking the faces for itself to wear for itself, taking up an identity of its own. The city and its parts are given animate characteristics of either human beings or human friendly animals. This personification is imposed on it by the narrators and characters of the poems.
In ‘Prufrock’ the poem is entirely from his perspective and therefore so is the way the city is seen. ‘Morning at the Window’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ are also written in the perspective of their narrator. ‘Preludes’ does not follow the same formulation as the narrator seems to be a somewhat omniscient presence rather than one person however the city is still described as person as it is in the other three poems. All of this shows that the city is always described through a subject perspective and so it is not written as a neutral presence.
It is always in somehow related to humans. And this is because it is used in place of genuine human relationships as a desperate attempt to overcome loneliness. Nancy Myers Halgrove write that “Eliot uses landscape to represent much more than scenery or setting; it is a means of defining or suggesting emotional or moral states.. “. While I have shown through this essay that I am in agreement with ideal dispute her further claim that the city is used to represent boredom, triviality and sterility.
While that may be the case | argue that the city is also used to represent the isolation that the people feel in a city where you are alone even when you are surrounded by other people. Relationships with other people are not genuine and do not have the same familiarity that people have with the city. The city is an important and regularly used motif modernist art and for the four Eliot poems discussed in this essay it is a way of reflecting the failures of human relationships.
