Eliot Flashcards
(4 cards)
PRELUDES
shifting locations suggest universality of city experience
‘blackened’
1) TIME: 24h day + ‘beat’ + I II III IV vs ‘infinite’. ‘gathering fuel’ to refuel the smoky days. ‘revolve’. the ancient women are concerned with ‘fuel’ not wood, some archetypal thing outside time
2) image of decay (olfactory)
3) irregular rhyme scheme is mechanical: ‘consciousness’ and ‘press’
4) ‘And’ = unremitting details
5) personification removes agency from humans; victims due to materialism
+ merges street with prostitute (look at her)& his soul
+ synecdoche
6) vacant lots: stagnation & fruitless change
7) moment of vision too painful to sustain: cynical.
8) Preludes: only an invitation to what we should know
9) light/nature shut out
10) ‘vision’ is ironic
no progression: the end of the day, the opening of the blinds etc are not preludes to anything new
Portrait of a Lady
negotiating surfaces of relationship
‘my buried life’
1) epigraph
2) Dramatic Monologue: reveals stuff about speaker
3) Over exquisite aestheticism/preciousness–
- ‘intimate’, ‘bloom / That is rubbed’, ‘latest Pole’ ‘VELLEITIES’ (he can see its pretentious) ‘cauchemar’ is self aware
seen also in attitude to friends: repeated 4 times in section 1; insecurity
4) occupying a different world in his mind he never brings to salon: musical motif: ‘cracked coronets’, ‘dull tom-tom’ tribal (HEART OF DARKNESS) ‘a prelude of its own’. disharmony between them. ‘out of tune’
their relationship never gets going because they’re talking different languages: gentile, aesthetic nicety vs savagery within: FREUD, JUNG: dark, precivilised forces that underly.
5) he wants to adjust to momentum of real world: ‘correct our watches… clocks/… bocks’
‘tobacco trance’ (repeated at end)
and then again ‘sporting page’, ‘park’ (observes himself from outside)
needs to try to ‘remain self-possessed’: unwelcome emotions
6) ‘You have the scene arrange itself’ but it looks like ‘Juliet’s tomb’. She tries, but is desparate.
seen in her triplicate use of ‘You’: insistent (!)
7) power game in 2nd section:
- ‘twists one in her fingers’: casual but brutal destruction (desire to stifle him)
- ‘Youth is cruel and has no remorse’: indirect to him? esp ‘smile’
- she has power: he behaves as she expects ‘smile and go on drinking tea’
8) repetitions in her speech. RQ: ‘what can you receive from me?’– he has no answer
‘I shall sit here, serving tea to friends…’ DOESNT CORRECT, trails off
9) his smug, ironic detachment falters:
‘cowardly amends…?’ he is no longer so certain, feels guilt
‘Are these ideas right or wrong?’
‘ill at ease’ RHYME ‘hands and knees’, ‘smile falls’
THEN AT END after ‘I shall sit here, serving tea to friends’: COMPLETELY: ‘dance, dance’ etc– he is no longer in charge, social language falters, theatrical, distorted struggle with emotions. a lady who might deserve a portrait clashes with unaccommodated life beneath.
10) lady has all the speech in the end section; lack of ease, desperation
his silence is his power, as she has to try different approaches
‘fate’, ‘rate’, ‘late’ (end stop; knows its futile), ‘ends’, ‘friends’ + ‘!’
11) his reaction: ‘Well! and what… some afternoon’ seems callous, but then complex emotions come afterwards: he is confused and ambivalent:
ANTITHESIS: ‘wise or foolish’, ‘tardy or too soon’, ends on question: forced to reflect on his behaviour.
ENDS WITH MILITARY LANGUAGE: ‘advantage’, ‘successful’, ‘dying fall’: it has been a battle of wills throughout.
PRUFROCK
the name: ‘very very prosaic’
reader takes in persona in ways the persona can never understand (as in life); fissure between how you think you come across and how you come across.
DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE but no listener - inside his own mind
1) Guido only speaks because he assumes Dante won’t leave: going nowhere, being a damned soul, his own hell.
sky to sea; mirrors Dante’s descent into Hell
2) ironic opening: repeated, they go nowhere (seen in non-ending; puts off coming to full-stop, no progressiveness of stanzas/couplets etc)
3) ‘In the room the… Michaelangelo’: social milieu +++ fear of women who talk self-confidently among themselves
4) fog is personified in deeply sensuous terms: unable to confront these feelings in himself, Prufrock must instead project/externalise them onto inanimate objects out of fear, to distance dangers
5) ‘indecisions’ ‘visions and revisions’; ‘in’ prefix is stressed, highlighting stasis
6) rhyme, but repetition: victimised by insistently repetitive movements of own anxious mind: emotionally and physically buttoned up:
‘thin, chin, pin, thin’
7) acute pain/embarrassment: ‘pinned and wriggling on the wall’ + ‘nerves’ ‘screen’
8) ‘(but in the lamplight downed wit….)’ does feel sexual attraction, but doesnt know what to do with it, leaves him stuck, doesnt know what to do with it, so shuts it away in an aside and orders himself back with tight rhyme (‘dress’… ‘digress’) BUT ‘perfume’: smell- the most animal sense; briefly let down guard
9) 'eternal Footman... snicker': capitalised, flicker/snicker rhyme; minor role, intimidated; Prufrock is guest and footman servant 'should I' or polonius (not central to drama of own life), or Marvell ball.
10) failure of communication: ‘not it at all’ etc
11) ‘I do not think that they will sing to me’: when desire is out of the question, he is momentarily at ease– the meter becomes more regular (iambic pentameter)
‘We have lingered’: consciousness unite, psyche is whole; conscious acknowledges subconscious, but then banished by ‘human voices’
The Hollow Men
as children make a game out of guy Fawkes, we make a similar game out of religion
1) anaphora and epiphora to open: collective group, we are included, collective lack of morality of modern man
declaratives – acceptance
2) ‘our dried voices…. as wind in dry grass’: their voices have merged with setting; they cant escape; voices likened to soiled setting
3) hope: they’re placed in the context of a wider outside world: there exists something outside them; hope? ‘And voices are’ lineation but then undercut
4) voices and eyes disembodied. ‘I’ = alone
5) dead land, cactus land, stone: dead and arid, analepsis, immersed in sterility (this is)
setting: ‘valley of dying stars’
6) waking alone but ‘we’
7) ‘lips that would kiss’ hope of redemption but frozen (prayers to broken stone end stopped and analepsis to broken column)
8) negation
9) indirect: tree reflects wind, voices illusion of wind
10) prickly pear: sterility like cactus: phallic and maypole (country copulatives); not growth, like normal mulberry bush
11) between, between : liminal state of stasis
12) ‘shadow’: fear; every effort to make potential become actual, shadow interferes: the frustration of impulse
13) truncated lines/typography: meaning is there, but cant be fully reached. god only heard in broken lines.
14) like nursery rhyme mocking — parody of ‘world without end’ liturgical prayer: ‘whimper’ cry of pain? weakness? fear? animalistic? hope -as newborn? asks us to seek different life?
