Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Preludes
I
1The winter evening settles down
2With smell of steaks in passageways.
3Six o'clock.
4The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
5And now a gusty shower wraps
6The grimy scraps
7Of withered leaves about your feet
8And newspapers from vacant lots;
9The showers beat
10On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
11And at the corner of the street
12A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
13And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
14The morning comes to consciousness
15Of faint stale smells of beer
16From the sawdust-trampled street
17With all its muddy feet that press
18To early coffee-stands.
19With the other masquerades
20That time resumes,
21One thinks of all the hands
22That are raising dingy shades
23In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
24You tossed a blanket from the bed,
25You lay upon your back, and waited;
26You dozed, and watched the night revealing
27The thousand sordid images
28Of which your soul was constituted;
29They flickered against the ceiling.
30And when all the world came back
31And the light crept up between the shutters
32And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
33You had such a vision of the street
34As the street hardly understands;
35Sitting along the bed's edge, where
36You curled the papers from your hair,
37Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
38In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
39His soul stretched tight across the skies
40That fade behind a city block,
41Or trampled by insistent feet
42At four and five and six o'clock;
43And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
44And evening newspapers, and eyes
45Assured of certain certainties,
46The conscience of a blackened street
47Impatient to assume the world.
48I am moved by fancies that are curled
49Around these images, and cling:
50The notion of some infinitely gentle
51Infinitely suffering thing.
52Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
53The worlds revolve like ancient women
54Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Notes
1] Perhaps influenced by Jules Laforgue's "Préludes Autographiques" (Poésies complètes, ed. Pascal Pia [Le Livre de Poche, 1970]: 30), the first poem in his first volume.
8] lots: properties without houses built on them.
16] sawdust-trampled street: sawdust was used to take up dirt on floors.
22] shades: window blinds.
36] papers for curling one's hair.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
© T.S. Eliot and Faber and Faber Ltd 1974
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (London: The Egoist, 1917): 24-26. E546 P784 1917 Fisher Rare Book Library.
First publication date:
July
1915
Publication date note: First printed in Blast 2 (July 1915). Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (London: Faber and Faber, 1969): A1, C19.
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 2:2002/4/24
Composition date:
October
1910
-
November
1911
Rhyme: irregular
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