"Preludes" Quotes

Part 3 - Devalues the girls life through alliteration which draws attention to the comparison he is making.

"And the light crept up between the shutters / And you heard the sparrows in the gutters"

Part 4 - The idea that anyone who puts their soul out to be seen (thus showing them as individual) has his soul "stretched" and "stampeded" which holds connotations of rush an disregard.

"His souls stretched tight across the skies / That fade behind the city block, / Or trampled by insistent feet"

Part 4 - The street is personified and is anxious to resume the same thing day in and day out - reaffirming the idea that civilisation is trapped in a monotonous and draining routine.

"Impatient to assume the world"

Part 1 - Describes the setting and holds connotations of death and dying, signafying to the reader that what follows is a display of sordid and unhealthy reality.

"The winter evening"

Part 4 - Reaffirms the idea of being trapped in a monotonous routine and degrades human life.

"The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots"

Part 4 - However, this hope is dashed in a cruel, mocking, cynical gesture.

"Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh"

Part 3 - The girls despair and pain is made clear in this summation. She has been condemned to understand the hell of society better than it understands itself.

"You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands"

Part 2 - The magnitude of this uniformity is exemplified.

"all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand dingy rooms"

Part 1 - Lifelessness is exemplified by contrasting the focus of the quote in a way that shows it to be more lively than any living creature in the poem.

"gusty shower wraps / The grimy scraps / Of withered leaves about your feet"

Part 2 - This quote suggests the subject is awaking groggily to its harsh reality without wanting to wake up at all. Additional use of personification.

"morning comes to consciousness"

Part 2 - Use of metonym acts to represent a whole population who comes and goes from work with all individuality stripped from them.

"muddy feet that press / To early coffee stand"

Part 1 - Sensory imagery used which connotes unhealthiness.

"smell of steaks in passageways"

Part 4 - Eliot leaves the reader crushed by at first offering some hope for the poem to move in a different direction that will empower the individual in this line. Religious connotations causing hope for freedom.

"some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing"

Part 3 - A word previously used to generalise is now used to describe the fractured imagery of the girl's mind.

"thousand"