[sara*]

هذا اللي لقيته عن preludes

Eliot’s “Preludes” consists of four uneven parts: Part I has 13 lines with an uneven rhyme scheme. Part II has 10 lines, again with an uneven rhyme scheme. Part III and IV both have 16 lines, but again with uneven rhymes and fewer rhymes than Parts I and II. The haphazard rhymes parallel the speaker’s stream-of-consciousness remarks.
Part I: “The winter evening settles down”
The speaker is describing what he sees as “[t]he winter evening settles down.” He also lets his readers smell what he smells, the odour of “steaks in passageways.” It is the dinner hour, “six o’clock.” He colourfully describes the end of the day as “burnt-out ends of smoky days,” likening the end of the day to the butt of a cigarette.
The reader might recall in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” how the speaker describes evening as “a patient etherised upon a table.” Such an attitude toward evening signifies loneliness and melancholy.
Then, a rainstorm blows up: “now a gusty shower wraps / The grimy scraps.” “Grimy scraps” indicates the ugliness of the speaker’s surroundings, as do other images in the rest of the stanza: “withered leaves” at his feet, “newspapers from vacant lots,” and then he notices “A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.” Is the cab-horse really “lonely” or is the speaker projecting his own feelings onto the animal?
Part II: “The morning comes to consciousness”
In part II, the speaker is waking up the next morning, again he allows the reader to see, hear, and smell the same things he experiences: “stale smells of beer / From the sawdust-trampled street / With all its muddy feet that press.”
He says that all those muddy feet are trampling to the “early coffee-stands” and other places that pretend to be important for that time of morning. And he even tells the reader what this time of morning brings to his mind: “One thinks of all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms.”