New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 161That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.In “Preludes” IV, the soul of the clerk returning from work at evening is
trampled like the street “by insistent feet.” His soul is also “stretched tight
across the skies,” suggesting perhaps his taut nerves.
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.The certainties of such people, certainties derived from the mass media and
from urban sensations, are as determined and insensitive as the street
blackened by trampling. Their certainties are almost as automatic as the
grasping reflex of the crab in “Rhapsody.”
In “Rhapsody,” the speaker on his way home late at night recognizes
the number on his door. “‘Memory!’” says the street lamp sardonically,
contrasting the mechanical memory of one’s address with Wordsworthian
memory. The indoor lamp “‘spreads a ring on the stair,’” giving another
kind of light from the moon’s.
“Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”The last twist of the knife.If the moonlight has yielded such mechanical sensations and memories, what
can be expected of ordinary life? The speaker’s thoughts are given to him by
the street lamps—a sign that perceiver and perceived are not distinguished.
The view of the self in these two poems was either influenced by
Bradley, or else, what is more likely, Bradley confirmed for Eliot a view of the
self he had already arrived at on his own.^11 F.H. Bradley, the turn-of-the-
century English philosopher, taught that the self can be known only through
experience; for the self cannot be distinguished from its psychical contents,
its sensations and memories of sensations. For the same reason, the self is in
experience hardly distinguishable from the not-self—each fills and
determines the other. “We have no right, except in the most provisional