Modern American Poetry

(^160) Robert Langbaum
In all these instances from “Preludes,” there is a minimum of that distinction
between perceiver and perceived, and hence of that will and organizing
power, which constitute an identity. Yet the validity of the sensations and the
vision of the street suggest some minimal awareness.
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” parodies the Wordsworth tradition in
that it opens up, under the transforming influence of moonlight, the flow of
memory and association. But moonlight in an urban setting does not yield
beauty. Reinforced by the light of a street lamp, it transforms the
streetwalker into a grotesque:
“Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”
The twisted eye recalls the memory of twisted things:
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach ...
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Perception again stirs memory when the sight of a cat slipping out its tongue
to devour butter recalls, in the passage I have quoted earlier, the equally
automatic reach of a child’s hand for a toy: “I could see nothing behind that
child’s eye.”
This vacancy, this automatic action without reserve of thought and
feeling, fascinates Eliot in his early view of character. Prufrock, who is
paralyzed by too much reserve of thought and feeling, longs for such
automatism: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws.” But the speaker of
“Preludes” sees it as wiping out individuality. “The morning comes to
consciousness” means there is no distinction among all the people who come
to minimal consciousness because it is morning:
One thinks of all the hands