We commemorated the birthday of T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) on this day last year by returning to the poems that marked his emergence as a serious poet, and it seems appropriate to do the same this year. The anxious self-examination and self-curation that characterize the poems in the 1917 “Prufrock and Other Observations” marked the appearance of a poetic voice that even more than a hundred years later still sounds fresh to us.

Encountering these poems, we recognize the soul-paralysis that too much self-probing can produce. We recognize the atomized self in its loneliness. We recognize the general griminess of the world — because we live in it. All the utopian visions, all the intended renewals of the human condition, have not exactly worked out the way they were supposed to. And here we are in the present, still in Eliot’s world.

If the visions of these “Preludes” appear to us in sharp familiarity, then, to our sorrow, we know why. Yet this familiar four-part invention yields to us more, perhaps, than we already know. The title, for example, recalls Wordsworth’s great “Prelude,” with its “spots of time” — a concept we’ve mused over in this space more than once. Each of these “Preludes” presents the negative of a “spot of time,” a glimpse into a consciousness unrefreshed by any sweet memory.

Simultaneously, the title suggests the musical prelude, a fugue or suite of dances preceding some larger composition. Of course, part of the point here is that there is no larger composition: nothing that these fugue-like scenes, lapping into each other, prepare for. Beyond the sordidness of the material world, with its dirty city sights and smells, its dirty people, the speaker in the final “Prelude” imagines a loving presence — “some infinitely gentle / infinitely suffering thing.”

Yet that vision remains only a “notion,” with modern reality only a series of “vacant lots” in which prehistoric “ancient women” forage for scraps to kindle their paltry fire. Five years later, Eliot would open “The Waste Land” (our Poem of the Day for April 14) with that famous line, “April is the cruellest month.” But even that cruelty, the bitterness of spring, seems a beautiful, impossible fantasy in this endless urban winter. 

Preludes
by T.S. Eliot

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.