A dramatic monologue in the Browning tradition, ' The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is composed of a number of sections which seem to lack a sequence of events. However, the poem does have a certain coherence supplied by the consistency of the feeling expressed. 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. The central character lacks the solidity of a Browning persona, being only a name with a voice. The poet deliberately sets up an antithesis between the romantic suggestion of a 'love song' and the prosaic name J. Alfred Prufrock.
The Preludes dwell on the same low aspects of urban life that we see depicted in Prufrock. 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 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 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. In preludes III and IV Eliot makes explicit the mind’s yearning for significance beyond the random contents of consciousness, presented in cubist disjunctiveness:
“And short square fingers stuffing pipes, And evening newspapers, and eyes Assured of certain certainties.” (Prelude IV)
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. Finally, evening again, still dull and monotonous. It is the watcher of these scenes whose soul is “stretched tight across the skies”, as much as to say his soul takes them all in, and is stretched as far as it can go by them. And then the “His” changes to “I” and the speaker of the poem concludes with the lines “I am moved by fancies………. Infinitely suffering thing”. Thus, in spite of nasty and squalid scenes, there remains this perception of something deeper and better. However, the perception is rejected with the three closing lines: “Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh…… in vacant lots”.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night is somewhat complicated in its feeling. The word “rhapsody” in music means a composition of enthusiastic character but indefinite in form. The poem concerns a windy night on a street “held in lunar synthesis”. The speaker is returning to his lodgings. The lunar spells dissolve the usual order of the memory and provides a new principle of association that will give sense to what appears to be a series of separate and distinct images. The principle of association is here introduced in the image focused by the street lamp.
Eliot's rhapsody explores a gloomy urban environment, though a definably French one. It is a record, as it seems, of a sleeping-walking movement through city streets, which presents the contents of memory in bizarre images with many dream-like juxtapositions. The flux of time is divided by the chiming of hours, a precarious and arbitrary imposition of order. The poem is intensely and characteristically visual; there are several instances of Eliot’s obsessive image of eyes and an imagistic concentration on objects that dwells on their essentiality while hinting at their larger implications. The poem is visual in its detail and musical in its organization, a pure example of the “music of images”.
