22 pages • 44 minutes read
T. S. EliotRhapsody On A Windy Night
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
External and Internal Time
The speaker lives in two different worlds of time. As they walk the streets at night, they are aware of the passage of linear time, or clock time. Hours pass, one by one, and are marked at the beginning of all but one of the stanzas, from midnight to 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, and 4:00 in the morning. These make up the basic movement of the poem within normal time. As the speaker walks, the streetlamps light their way, and they observe the landscape—a woman in a doorway, a cat scavenging in the gutter, the moon. By the time they get home, it is not far off morning, and a new day awaits.
However, the moon, with its “lunar incantations” (Line 4), undermines the passage of clock time. It not only stimulates the speaker’s memories but removes them from any expected context or order, their “divisions and precisions” (Line 7). These memories crop up as images in response to street scenes. The images are without context or meaning; they are shaken up “[a]s a madman shakes a dead geranium” (Line 12). They are, however, interconnected, and convey an ominous and disorienting ambience. They give a clue to the speaker’s consciousness and convey their subjective reality, their own form of disembodied time.
At the end of the poem, the speaker is brought back to linear time. The lamp, personified with human qualities, instructs them to attend to a series of routine, everyday tasks—turning the key in the latch, climbing the stairs, putting their shoes at the door, cleaning their teeth; it is time to “prepare for life” (Line 77). The speaker is firmly back in the predictable, linear world, although it offers them no comfort.
A Surreal and Nightmarish Mood
Many of the speaker’s memories convey a sense of lifelessness, decay, and pointlessness, symbolizing a negative mood or outlook on the part of the speaker. A feeling of alienation and solitude seems to haunt them as they walk the streets. The poem progresses from elements of the landscape to memories to the speaker’s implied feelings or experiences of life.
The streetscape acts as visual stimulus. The twisted corner of the woman’s eye, for example, sparks a memory of “a crowd of twisted things” (Line 24). The twisted tree branch is dead, having undergone the process of being “[e]aten smooth” (Line 26), now resembling a “skeleton” (Line 28). It is as if the earth is showing what, finally, all things are reduced to—the branch, “stiff and white” (Line 29), is an image of bone and death. The next twisted thing is a broken and rusted spring. This symbolizes lost vitality, something the speaker seems to feel keenly. The speaker’s view of the external landscape—hellish and lonely—reflects their internal state.
The cat in Stanza 4 is a solitary creature surviving as best it can on food scraps lying in gutters. It gives rise to the speaker’s memory of a child grabbing a toy; the eyes of the child are vacant. Not even a child can provide a positive, vibrant image in this world of deprivation and disconnectedness. Even the moon is feeble and “alone” (Line 59), stuck with her collection of long-accumulated unsavory smells. After the speaker regards the moon, more negative images float into their mind, such as “dust in crevices” (Lines 64), an image of nothingness and neglect, and of “sunless dry geraniums” (Line 63), flowers that are being deprived of what they most need and serve as an image of decay.
The everyday world is horrifying for the speaker. Whether he lives in clock time or memory time makes no difference. His life is isolated, dreary, routine, half-dead, devoid of anything that might bring joy or fulfilment. It is actively painful, as the final image—“the last twist of the knife” (Line 78)—makes clear. The return to daily routine offers no relief from the torment of being alive. The speaker is trapped in a meaningless world from which they cannot escape, either during their nighttime wanderings or in the routines and responsibilities of day-to-day living.
Alienation in the City
The speaker is a solitary figure, but they also represent an archetype—the alienated city dweller locked in a tedious, repetitive, meaningless way of living—Eliot’s vision of modern urban life. The prostitute, with her torn, stained dress, suggests the city’s desolation. The prying eyes looking out from behind the shutters suggest loneliness and anonymity, like that experienced by the speaker.
This is the same urban world that Eliot created in other poems of the period. In “Preludes,” people are isolated from one another in cheap, rented accommodations. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” also depicts the bleakness of the urban landscape, with its “half-deserted streets” and “[l]onely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows” (Eliot, T. S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” 1915. Poetryfoundation.org).
In “Preludes,” the language resembles some of the images in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” An anonymous “you” dozes in bed “and watche[s] the night revealing / The thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted” (Eliot, T. S. “Preludes.” Poetryfoundation.org.). The title of another early Eliot poem, “Morning at the Window” (1917), suggests that people live in their own separate worlds behind a barrier, looking out on the goings-on outside. The speaker of the poem sees “[t]wisted faces from the bottom of the street,” echoing the twisting imagery of “Rhapsody.” (Eliot, T. S. “Morning at the Window.” poets.org).
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