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ELA: Analysis of Rhapsody on a Windy Night – Quizlet
It represented his isolation never ending and decaying continues; time keeps going on in an isolated world. Click again to see term.
Source: quizlet.com
Date Published: 11/30/2021
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Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T.S. Eliot – Poem Analysis
It represents the bones of the world that have been scrubbed clean of anything living. The next lines speak to a loss of innocence, as seen in the eyes of a …
Source: poemanalysis.com
Date Published: 6/2/2022
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A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’
Sylvia Plath once sa that she thought anything should be able to be used in a poem, but she couldn’t imagine a toothbrush in a poem.
Source: interestingliterature.com
Date Published: 5/9/2022
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Rhapsody; HSC English Text – Module B | Belrose Tutoring
And that is exactly what Eliot’s poem is: a depiction of a slurred, … The image of the woman in this stanza represents temptation and, in turn, …
Source: www.belrosetutoring.com
Date Published: 10/7/2021
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Rhapsody on a Windy Night Summary & Analysis by TS Eliot
As the poem progresses, the sense of atrophy and decay intensifies. Even the moon has “lost her memory,” which itself represents a kind of death; memory creates …
Source: www.litcharts.com
Date Published: 5/19/2022
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Love and its Critics – 8. Shakespeare: The Return of Fin’amor
This poem gives us a picture of compromise and lies as the basis for an apparently successful relationship. No ladder of love or pathway to the divine here: …
Source: books.openedition.org
Date Published: 9/15/2021
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14 Feminist Poems to Inspire Strong Women – TCK Publishing
feminist poems blog post image. Poetry is perhaps one of the most personal forms of art, as it allows writers the ultimate freedom to express their …
Source: www.tckpublishing.com
Date Published: 2/30/2022
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ELA: Analysis of Rhapsody on a Windy Night Flashcards
What do the lines mean “I couldn’t see anything behind this child’s eye. I’ve seen eyes on the street trying to peer through lighted shutters”?
Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T.S. Eliot
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” by T.S. Published in Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917, Eliot is a free verse poem unconstrained by any particular rhyme or rhythmic pattern. The lines are of different lengths, as are the stanzas.
There are a number of elements in this piece that create a sense of unity in the text, one of the most important of which is time. The poem begins at twelve in the morning and ends at four in the morning. No matter what happens in the real world, time moves on. From the craziest, darkest moments on the road, the wandering man eventually survives his home and mundane existence.
summary
Rhapsody on a Windy Night” by T.S. Eliot paints a desolate and depressing landscape of contemporary life, enough to drive one insane.
The poem begins with the speaker describing a wandering man walking down a dark street. It’s midnight and the memories spin and blur. This distorts one’s experience of the world and makes it harder to determine what is real and what is not. The wanderer hears the street lamps din and finally speak. They tell the speaker to look into a doorway and observe a woman standing there. Her face is distorted and the scene looks spooky.
This encounter brings out some of the strange memories that life warps. There is a slippery branch on the beach. It represents the bones of the world scrubbed clean of all living things. The next few lines speak of a loss of innocence seen in a child’s eyes. Then the poem moves on the moon. “She” is a comforting presence as she has lost her memories. The poem finally ends with the speaker returning to his apartment. Everything is there, ready for him to go to bed and get up in the morning and return to the dark and depressing world described in the previous five stanzas.
You can read the full poem here and more by T.S. Eliot’s poems here.
subjects
The themes of this play are numerous, and Eliot is able to weave them all into a bewildering and depressing portrait of contemporary life. Memory is seen as something lost, found and twisted. It appears several times in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”. From the speaker who seems lost in distorted thoughts, to the moon who forgets, and then again the speaker who remembers the bleakness of life on earth.
The madness is closely related to the struggles with memory in the poem. There is confusion in the sights and sounds of the speaker relays and a clear sense of confusion on the part of the walker. The modern world with all its dark corners and twisted smiles is enough to drive anyone insane. This becomes even more apparent when the person is isolated like the wanderer.
Analysis of Rhapsody on a Windy Night
verse one
Twelve o’clock. Along the streets held in a lunar synthesis, (…) And through the dark midnight rooms memory trembles, Like a madman shakes a dead geranium.
From the opening lines, the poem’s setting is clear. It starts at 00:00 on a windy night. The world is held in a “lunar synthesis”. The moon is an important image in the text and its symbolism, particularly in relation to madness, is crucial. “Lunar” is used again in the fourth line and is associated with “incantations” or whispers said aloud by the speaker. The “grounds,” which are usually stable, “dissolve” as he speaks. All the more confusing are the memories he ponders. Perhaps this is a symptom of his madness, or a cause. The moon later reappears in Rhapsody on a Windy Night.
He switches to talk about the environment and how it’s affected by what’s going on inside him. He says that the street lamps are beating like drums. That’s probably just happening in his head, but it shows how consuming his mental state is. The next few lines explain the dark, groundless place where the speaker exists. It’s something that’s compared to a madman shaking “a dead geranium.” The night is personified to show the speaker its importance, and the geranium is inserted into the text as it was symbolized at points, folly or stupidity.
stanza two
Half past twelve, The street lamp flickered, The street lamp murmured, (…) Is torn and stained with sand, And you see the corner of her eye Twists like a crooked pin.”
As with all verses, time runs forward. At the same time, the speaker does not seem to do this. At least at this point nothing essential changes for him. However, the streetlights move from slamming to “sputter[ing]” and “murmur[ing]”. A reader should note the repetition in these lines, this technique is called parallel syntax. It occurs when lines are grammatically similar. Usually this is used to add meaning or emphasize an element of the scene. That’s definitely the case in Rhapsody on a Windy Night. The street lamps become increasingly important to the narrator.
They become so personified that they begin to speak. The lights tell the speaker to “consider” or watch,
[…] this woman who hesitates in front of you in the light of the door that opens to her like a grin.Although it is not said openly, this woman is probably a prostitute. Whether she is or not, there is no doubt that she is not doing well. Her clothes are “torn and stained with sand.” She’s standing in an open doorway that looks eerily like “a grin.” The street lamps, too, use a strange simile to instruct the speaker to pay attention to the corner of her eye. She has an interesting and perhaps foreboding expression. Her eye “spins like a bent pin.”
stanza three
The memory throws up and dry a lot of twisted things; A twisted branch on the beach (…) A broken spring in a factory yard, rust clinging to the form left by the force, Hard and curled and ready to break.
In the third stanza of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” the speaker moves to a different memory. It is “high and dry” and difficult to recover from. It throws “twisted things” in front of the speaker and brings even more to mind. Such as a “bent branch on the beach”. It was smoothed by the ocean like
[…] the world gave up the secret of her skeleton, stiff and white.These dark images add to the already depressing mood of Rhapsody on a Windy Night. All that remains in this parable are the “stiff and white” bones. It’s as if the world and everything good in it is worn out. This is the mental state the speaker is in.
The next few lines speak of rust on a “broken spring” and how all the “power” of the world has gone. It is ready to snap. Just like the orator who seems to be nearing a climax in his madness, the world is on the brink.
stanza four
Lines 1-7
Half past two, (…) slipped out and pocketed a toy that ran along the quay.
The street lamp continues in the fourth stanza. Over time, it prompts the speaker to “comment” or notice “the cat” lying flat in the gutter. It sticks out its tongue and eats “a stick of rancid butter”. This line is composed in such a way that the cat looks desperate. As if there were nothing else to eat and it had to resort to the worst portions the street has to offer.
At the same time, the action is automatic, like a child grabbing “a toy.” In this description, the child appears to be stealing. This is underlined by the fact that the scene is scheduled to take place at half past one in the morning.
Lines 8-13
I couldn’t see anything behind this child’s eye. (…) Grabbed the end of a stick I was holding for him.
The child is not happy. In their eyes there is no purity, instead there is “nothing”. The speaker remembers how he
[…] seen eyes on the street trying to peek through lighted shutters,This is just an example of a case where he saw nothingness in another being’s eyes. He goes on to refer to a crab in a pond with barnacles on its back. It holds tight to the end of his stick while he examines it. This is a broader metaphor for the state of the world described in Rhapsody on a Windy Night.
stanza five
Two thirty, The lamp flickered, The lamp murmured in the dark.
The fifth stanza is by far the shortest. It only contains three lines, but it continues the pattern. It’s an hour later, “half past two”. The lines from the second stanza regarding the flickering and murmuring of the lamps are repeated. All of this is still happening in the dark. These lines are something of an interlude in the story, showing that time passes and darkness and madness remain.
stanza six
Lines 1-7
The lamp buzzed: (…) The moon has lost its memory.
In the first part of the sixth stanza, the speaker returns to the lamps. They “hummed” and told the speaker to “look at the moon.” It is personified and emphasizes the way it does not judge the speaker. Contrasted with the street lamps that keep staring at him, “La lune ne garde aucune rancune”. It holds no grudge against him for what he does or how he lived. Instead the moon
[…] a weak eye winks, she smiles into the corners. She straightens the hairs of the grass.As a reader would probably expect, the moon is referred to as feminine. The repetition of “you” in these lines is known as an anaphora. It occurs when a word or phrase is repeated multiple times on closely spaced lines. She is a gentle presence in the world. Her eye is “weak” and she smiles and “smoothes the hairs of the grass”. A reader may associate the description of the woman in the second stanza with that of the moon. The next line adds that she “lost her memory.” This is important because of the general theme of madness that runs through the play. There she is, peaceful and ignorant, perhaps because she can’t remember.
Lines 8-20
A smudged smallpox tears her face, Her hand twists a paper rose, (…) And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells in bars.
In the second part of the sixth stanza some less endearing details are added to the depiction of the moon. She has pockmarks on her face, a metaphor used to describe the craters and cracks on the lunar surface. The most important part of these lines is that the moon is “alone / with all the nightly smells”. As the wanderer seems to be. The image of “geraniums” appears again. It is accompanied by the man remembering some of the memories he lost.
The memories are all based on senses. From the smell of “closed rooms” to the “smell of cocktails in bars”. These aren’t pleasant sights and smells, so they tie in perfectly with the rest of Rhapsody on a Windy Night.
verse seven
The lamp said: “Four o’clock, (…) the bed is open; The toothbrush hangs on the wall, put your shoes in front of the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
In the last verse of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” it’s 4:00 am. All the complex similes and metaphors of the last five stanzas fade away and the language becomes much clearer. The speaker has come
[…] the number on the door. Memory!The speaker is brought back into the world. He’s at the right door, has the right key, and goes inside. Everything is as he left it, banal and ordinary. Eliot wanted to emphasize the desolation of everyday life. One must go through these routines every day in order to enter the world.
The last line is separated from the stanza and gives the poem a powerful conclusion. Eliot adds, “The last twist of the knife.” The fact that life will go on forever and will always be bleak is the worst part of the situation. For Eliot, or at least the speaker he channeled in this play and others, existence is hopeless.
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A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’
A reading of Eliot’s early poem by Dr. Olivier Tearle
Sylvia Plath once said that she thought anything could be used in a poem, but she couldn’t imagine a toothbrush in a poem. But by the end of Rhapsody on a Windy Night, T.S. Eliot had used the toothbrush as a nod to everyday life (we brush our teeth every day, at least if we want to avoid too many visits to the dentist). , hanging on the wall while the shoes wait by the door, ready for tomorrow when the world will spring into action again.
‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ is often overlooked among Eliot’s early poems – ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘Preludes’ are better known – but its innovative imagery deserves closer analysis. You can read Rhapsody on a Windy Night here.
This poem is quite difficult to navigate or, once oriented, to stick to. Therefore, a brief synopsis of the poem as its nocturnal descriptions unfold may be advisable.
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night”: Synopsis
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” plays between twelve o’clock – midnight – and four o’clock in the morning. At midnight, the speaker wanders the streets of a city, watching the moonlight on the streets and the way it makes everything – even one’s own memories – vague and indistinct. For example, the light from the street lamps seems to emit both a sound and a light (‘fatalistic drum’), and the abstract ‘midnight’ seems to possess an potency that shakes the speaker’s memory like a madman shakes a flower (the meaning that this time of night has this effect on our memory without it being aware of it, like the madman).
We advance an hour and a half until half past one in the morning. Now the street lamps themselves appear to be speaking, beckoning the speaker to a woman standing in a doorway (probably a “lady of the night” or prostitute), although the woman’s appearance is unflattering. The sand on the woman’s dress seems to evoke a memory of the time she spent on the beach and of the crooked branch of a tree, dried up and bare, that the speaker seems to have seen there, like the bones of the earth protruding from the ground (similar to how a skinny person’s ribs protrude and are visible).
The image of the ‘broken spring in a factory yard’ covered in rust suggests a loss of energy and vitality – this spiral spring that could once bounce, contract and expand is now abandoned, useless, lifeless.
We advance another hour until half past one. The speaker of this poem must suffer from insomnia. Doesn’t he go to bed? The streetlights start talking to him again, telling him to watch a cat in the gutter: the animal is eating some smelly and spoiled butter.
This image seems to conjure up an image from the speaker’s childhood, when he saw a child, with one quick movement, reach out his hand (like a cat’s tongue slipping out to devour the butter) to pocket a toy that was on Walked along the quay (we’re back at the beach – maybe a children’s holiday by the sea?).
The speaker couldn’t look into this child’s mind to figure out why he was taking that toy. Then he remembers an old crab covered in barnacles that he found in a rock pond one afternoon and played with.
Another hour later, half past two, and the lamp is talking again. Is this speaker drunk or just lacking sleep? Anyway, the lamp instructs the speaker to look at the moon and recites a line in French that translates to “The moon bears no grudges.” The moon has lost its memory, we are told, and the craters on its pale surface are likened to the pockmarks left on a smallpox survivor’s face. But this moon also has hands, one of which rotates a “paper rose” smelling of dust and perfume.
This image conjures up more memories in the speaker’s mind: images of dryness (‘sunless dry geraniums’, ‘dust in cracks’) and femininity (that scent again: ‘feminine smells in closed rooms’).
Half an hour later and it’s four in the morning. The speaker arrives at home at his front door (“the number on the door”). He unlocks his door, enters and climbs the stairs to the bed. His toothbrush hangs on the wall, ready to be put to work in the morning; the lamp commands the speaker to put his shoes outside the door for tomorrow, when he is expected to get up, wash and dress, get ready for work.
The whole everyday life of routine and drudgery lures you back in a few hours. This, the narrator confides in that chilling closing line, is the “final twist with the knife”: to break the camel’s back.
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night”: Analysis
Eliot liked to give his poems titles taken from the music: compare The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, A Song for Simeon, Four Quartets. A ‘rhapsody’ is a free instrumental composition in an extended movement, particularly emotional in character, and this word suits Eliot’s poem with its free verse, irregular bar and line lengths, irregular stanzas and emotional content.
Some of the phrases from “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” appear in the lyrics of the song “Memory” from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Cats,” which was inspired by Eliot’s book of easy verse for children. Indeed, ‘memory’ is a key word for ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’: the word occurs five times in the poem, including the first stanza and the last (i.e. before that standalone closing line). But the relationship between the speaker’s nightly observations and the memories they evoke is not always clear.
Still, we can suggest some explanations that will help make the poem a little less “surreal” than it might otherwise appear. The cat’s tongue, pointing to the child’s hand, seems clear enough given the quick, furtive movement of both; but why this should conjure up the cancer is less obvious. But crabs are hard-shelled creatures, and this one is doubly armored, with barnacles clinging to its shell: just as the child’s facial expression says nothing of how the child is feeling, the crab protects itself with its strong shell, and despite the speakers, holding it with a stick holds the creature in place.
If you found this analysis of Rhapsody on a Windy Night useful, you may also enjoy our brief introduction to the life and work of T. S. Eliot.
The author of this article, Dr. Oliver Tearle is a literary critic and Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. His publications include The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.
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