READING MODULE 5
23 / MARCH / 06
By: GASPAR JULIO NAVARRO AMADOR
SUBJECT & POEM: The vision of the city through “Rhapsody on a windy night”, by T.S. Elliot
 
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
 
1 Twelve o'clock.
2 Along the reaches of the street
3 Held in a lunar synthesis,
4 Whispering lunar incantations
5 Disolve the floors of memory
6 And all its clear relations,
7 Its divisions and precisions,
8 Every street lamp that I pass
9 Beats like a fatalistic drum,
10 And through the spaces of the dark
11 Midnight shakes the memory
12 As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
 
13 Half-past one,
14 The street lamp sputtered,
15 The street lamp muttered,
16 The street lamp said,
17 "Regard that woman
18 Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
19 Which opens on her like a grin.
20 You see the border of her dress
21 Is torn and stained with sand,
22 And you see the corner of her eye
23 Twists like a crooked pin."
 
24 The memory throws up high and dry
25 A crowd of twisted things;
26 A twisted branch upon the beach
27 Eaten smooth, and polished
28 As if the world gave up
29 The secret of its skeleton,
30 Stiff and white.
31 A broken spring in a factory yard,
32 Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
33 Hard and curled and ready to snap.
 
34 Half-past two,
35 The street-lamp said,
36 "Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
37 Slips out its tongue
38 And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
39 So the hand of the child, automatic,
40 Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along
41 the quay.
42 I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
43 I have seen eyes in the street
44 Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
45 And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
46 An old crab with barnacles on his back,
47 Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
 
48 Half-past three,
49 The lamp sputtered,
50 The lamp muttered in the dark.
 
51 The lamp hummed:
52 "Regard the moon,
53 La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
54 She winks a feeble eye,
55 She smiles into corners.
56 She smooths the hair of the grass.
57 The moon has lost her memory.
58 A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
59 Her hand twists a paper rose,
60 That smells of dust and old Cologne,
61 She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells
62 That cross and cross across her brain.
63 The reminiscence comes
64 Of sunless dry geraniums
65 And dust in crevices,
66 Smells of chestnuts in the streets
67 And female smells in shuttered rooms
68 And cigarettes in corridors
69 And cocktail smells in bars."
 
70 The lamp said,
71 "Four o'clock,
72 Here is the number on the door.
73 Memory!
74 You have the key,
75 The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
76 Mount.
77 The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
78 Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."
79 The last twist of the knife.

by: T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
(Ref 1)
 

In this paper I will deal with one of the main themes in T.S. Elliot, which is the vision of the city. In this poem, Rhapsody on a windy night, the city landscape is directly related to the night and all its connotations, in a very particular way. The text as a whole is the fantastic view of the city at night during a walk. This walk and the visions that the poet has through it, have a double meaning. On the one hand these scenes are a real referent. On the other hand, this walk is not just through the city, but also through Elliot’s and the reader’s mind. (Ref 2)

The poem is divided into five parts and each one of them refers to a specific situation. Each of these situations makes reference to a different experience. Both time and space are related.

As the style makes difficult to divide the poem into stanzas due to the free verse practised by the author. (Ref 3). I will deal with the different parts of the poem distinguishing them by the change of time. This means that from twelve o’clock to four o’clock there are five parts that describe a different moment of the landscape. (Ref 2)

In the title the word rhapsody makes a clear reference to what the reader can find. This is something irregular, like the rhyme in the poem. The expression a ‘windy night’ gives the sense of disturbance, of something murky, not clear and confusing.

There are two divisions into time and space in the poem. On the one hand, the division of the poem into stages or cycles of time as in ‘Twelve o’clock', ‘Half past one’..., and the clear references of the hour in every moment of the poem, symbolizes the obsessive nature of the author, as in:

11 ‘Midnight shakes the memory
12 As a madman shakes a dead geranium.’

(Ref 2)

On the other hand, the division of these stages of the poem into different spaces makes reference to different psychological states of mind. (Ref 3)

The poem is a comparison between city life, time and memory.

From the very beginning the author expresses how the street is compared to the human mind, in a very twisted way. The street at night and the different situations, in which somebody might be involved, is like the different thoughts the human mind can have. For the author, there seems to be a narrow relationship between the night, the city streets and the human mind, as in:

2 ‘Along the reaches of the street
3 Held in a lunar synthesis,
4 Whispering lunar incantations
5 Disolve the floors of memory’
This comparison is taken further. At night the most important characteristic is that there is no light, but darkness. Thus, the only thing that can be seen at night is what is lighted by the streetlights. In the poem, the author points out the relationship between the street-lamp that illuminates the street in dark and therefore to see different things, and the night which paradoxically illuminates human mind waking it up, as in:
10‘And through the spaces of the dark
11 Midnight shakes the memory’
Or in:
24 The memory throws up high and dry
25 A crowd of twisted things;
In Elliot’s poetry we can see that the view of the city is very peculiar. There is personalization in the sense that things, objects, and urban furniture in general come alive, and they are able to talk or react with processes that are characteristic of human being, as in:
14 ‘The street lamp sputtered,
15 The street lamp muttered,
16 The street lamp said...’
 
Thus, the author creates the dichotomy of human vs. no human. But in the poem it is reversed in the sense that now objects are humanized whereas people are dehumanized. (Ref 3)
Through this night-walk, what we physically see in the city and that corresponds to a symbolism, is:
- A woman who seems to be either a whore, or someone that has suffered a sort of violent experience, as in:
20‘You see the border of her dress
21 Is torn and stained with sand,
22 And you see the corner of her eye
23 Twists like a crooked pin.’
- A factory that seems to be either closed or abandoned, symbol of the industrialization and the falling of nature:
31‘A broken spring in a factory yard,
32 Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
33 Hard and curled and ready to snap’
(Ref 4)
- In the third part ‘Half past two’, there are just examples of a place which is no longer hospitable, where nobody is safe, where nobody trusts anybody. As in:
42 I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
- In the forth part, the moon as a symbol of the night becomes old and sick:
57 ‘The moon has lost her memory.’
58 ‘A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,’
- In the fifth part, there is a release of all the frustration that the reader has suffered through the poem, when the protagonist comes back to his or her place, where he or her finds something very important that is ‘memory’. This word in the poem represents youth, conscience and there is a sense of recovering from drunkenness. Then, appears what we all are used to see before going to bed, which is very comforting, like ‘the bed’, ‘the tooth-brush’ (77), ‘put your shoes of’ (78)... (Ref 2)
There is a contradiction when the author says: ‘prepare for life’ (78), just at the moment when you are going to sleep. But, what the author wants to evoke is that actually life in the city is so wuthering and stormy that for him it is not life but death. Then, the moment when you come alive is when you are actually unconscious and sleeping. Then you are happy.
The poem is not a continuum but a series of frozen-frames where every one of them starts with the light of a street lamp, which illuminates every scene, every situation in the street and in turn stimulates the divided memory. (Ref 2)
The critic to modern life through the description of the city at night and the dehumanization of humanity by alienation from nature is what T.S. Elliot denounces in this poem. There is a very complete description of every scene in each of the situations through the street walk at night. On the one hand, there is the physical description, and on the other hand there is what also makes a city very characteristic, which is its smell.
It is also worthy to note that the whole verbal system in the poem seems to attract directly the attention of the reader, because there are a great number of imperatives, which implies orders, things to do.
This main theme that is the critic of a decadent society through the description of the city landscape, is one of the most effective ways to denounce either, a sick and unhappy society or an insane state of mind in general terms.
 
 
 
 
 
REFERENCES
 
1 - Jalic LLC. The literature network: Online literature, poems, and quotes. Essays & Summaries:
o http://www.online-literature.com / 
o http://www.online-literature.com/ts-eliot/poems/16/ 
 20/03/2006
 

2 - Dr. Tina L. Nalón, Study Questions on Poems by T.S. Eliot, Ferrum College, http://www.ferrum.edu/thanlon/studyq/tseliot.htm

20/03/2006

3 - Cary Nelson. Designed by Matthew Hurt, Northern American Poetry Home, 2000, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/Maps/index.htm

20/03/2006

4 - Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Portada - Wikipedia, la Enciclopedia Libre. 16/01/2006

http://es.wikipedia.org,

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