The Power, or Powerlessness, of Nature: Eliot's 'Preludes' and Hardy's 'Afterwards' Amelie Maurice-Jones 12th Grade

The conflict between humanity and the natural world is one that spans back into an ancient past, perhaps beginning with the myth of Prometheus - punished for granting the gift of fire to mankind. Due to this, it is unsurprising that both modernist poet T.S Eliot and victorian poet Thomas Hardy are so concerned with the power dynamics of nature in their poems ‘Preludes’ and ‘Afterwards’. Whilst Eliot’s poem moves between claustrophobic settings to portray the natural world as powerless and trapped, humans are characterised as able to choose whether or not they rejuvenate the power of nature. In contrast, Hardy’s perspective of nature is far more powerful, and is shown to transcend the barriers of time, whilst also memorialise the memory of human beings.

In ‘Preludes’, Eliot presents nature as powerless to the rising force of industrialism which is shown to suffocate and control both the natural world, and the poem’s city-dwellers. The setting detail of a ‘lonely cab-horse’ moving through the city’s outskirts is used in the first stanza to immediately present ‘natural’ creatures as enslaved by the surrounding cityscape: the compound noun ‘cab-horse’, implies that even powerful creatures such as the horse have been distorted into...